Time Machine on OpenIndiana

We've been using a few ReadyNAS boxes for Time Machine for a while now, but they're not without their problems - they're slow, and a bit limited in capacity. The are getting on - they're 1000S model, so pretty much original - they even pre-date Netgear's acquisition of Infrant! It also doesn't work very well with Lion for Time Machine.

So I've been playing with OpenSolaris, and now OpenIndiana, since I love ZFS - we use Sun/Oracle 7000 series storage on our production systems, so having something equivalent in the office is sensible.

So to build a Time Machine the main component needed is and Apple Filing Protocol  server.

The Open Indiana has a good wiki for documentation, and http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/Using+OpenIndiana+as+a+storage+server and http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/Netatalk are very good guides to get Netatalk up and running.

Netatalk works out of the box - merely create a tm user account, and a line in

/usr/local/etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default

consisting of:

/space2/timemachine/ timemachine options:tm

where /space2/timemachine/ is a zfs filesystem specially created.

One final tweak needed is in /usr/local/etc/netatalk/afpd.conf is to change the following line

- -tcp -noddp -uamlist uams_dhx.so,uams_dhx2.so -nosavepassword -setuplog "default log_debug"

to

- -tcp -noddp -uamlist uams_dhx.so,uams_dhx2_passwd.so -nosavepassword -setuplog "default log_debug"

This stops the daemon crashing as odd points.