I was looking at one of my classic Macs a few weeks ago, and noticed that my Ubuntu 18.04 netatalk server wasn’t showing up in the Chooser anymore. If you’re not familiar with netatalk, it’s an implementation of Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) that runs on Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and NetBSD. It allows other operating systems to act as Mac file servers. Version 2.x, which I use, supports the ancient AppleTalk protocol. This allows it to work with really old classic Macs that don’t even have a TCP/IP stack installed. Support for AppleTalk was removed in version 3.x, so that’s why I’m still using 2.x.

I checked out the server, and noticed that atalkd wasn’t running.

doug@miniserver:~$ ps ax | grep atalkd
3351 pts/0 R+ 0:00 grep --color=auto atalkd

Hmmm….why wouldn’t atalkd be running? I went ahead and tried to restart netatalk:

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