Make TimeMachine in OS X Lion work with Debian Squeeze (stable) netatalk servers

21st July 2011

All you need to do to get TimeMachine running again is to install the netatalk package from unstable. It’s a really simple process. First add the wheezy (testing) repository to your apt configuration.

# /etc/apt/sources.list
# stable repo
deb http://cdn.debian.net/debian squeeze main

# new testing repo
deb http://cdn.debian.net/debian wheezy main

Then give your squeeze repo a higher priority to your wheezy one (to prevent wheezy packages being accidentally installed when they’re not wanted).

# /etc/apt/preferences.d/priorities
Package: *
Pin: release a=squeeze
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: *
Pin: release a=wheezy
Pin-Priority: 650

Now install netatalk, making sure to tell apt-get to get it from the wheezy repo.

sudo apt-get install netatalk/wheezy

And remember, if you’ve added an afpd service description to your avahi-daemon configuration, remove it and restart netatalk (because netatalk 2.2beta will register itself automatically with avahi).

Happy Lion-ing!