Time Machine – RHEL/CentOS/SL 6 Style

Written by  on September 27, 2011 

There are lots of conflicting information on how to get your MacBook to back up to a Linux server. Here’s the canned solution for RHEL/CentOS/SL 6 users out there so they don’t have to waste too much time:

  1. Add EPEL repo to your repo
    yum install http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm
  2. Install netatalk
    yum install netatalk
  3. Modify /etc/netatalk/afpd.conf to add this line
    - -transall -uamlist uams_randnum.so,uams_dhx2.so -nosavepassword -advertise_ssh
  4. Add this line to the /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default
    /TimeMachine TimeMachine allow:username options:usedots,upriv,tm cnidscheme:dbd vols
    izelimit:1000000

    • Creates a TimeMachine share
    • Writes to /TimeMachine directory
    • Enable timemachine support
    • Uses the proper CNID Database Schema so that it supports HFS+ stuff without the partition
    • 1TB space limit
    • Only username is allowed to write to it
  5. Make sure it advertises using avahi

    <?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
    <!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
    <service-group>
    <name replace-wildcards="yes">%h</name>
    <service>
    <type>_afpovertcp._tcp</type>
    <port>548</port>
    </service>
    <service>
    <type>_device-info._tcp</type>
    <port>0</port>
    <txt-record>model=Xserve</txt-record>
    </service>
    </service-group>
  6. start/restart your netatalk service and share that volume
    /etc/init.d/netatalk restart

Thanks to these articles for inspiration:

Category : Uncategorized

Tags : •