how to set it up

The only way I have found to circumvent this annoyance is to play a little trick on iMovie. And that trick is to move the original ~/Movies folder under a different name and put a symlink in its place (to the network folder of your choice).

Here are the steps I took from the Terminal to do this (you will need to have Administrator privileges and you will need to know where your network folder is attached):

• sudo mv ~/Movies/ ~/Movies-original
• ln -s /Volumes/my-network-volume/Movies/ ~/Movies

Now, when I load up iMovie it will use the networked volume. If you don’t like this, you can always move your ~/Movies-original folder back where it was.

remaining issues

Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect fix. There are two caveats or issues I have found.

One, is that now my hard drive (called Papa Bear) is listed twice in the Project Library:

And two, is that when you delete an event or project from within iMovie, it moves the project into a temporary folder rather than actually deleting it. The next time you open iMovie, it will show up again. I’m sure this is because it thinks it is working with a bona fide Trash system but its not (because it is network storage. See this example:

In order to get around this annoyance, I created a Python script which removes the temporary files for me and created a cron job to run the script from time to time (cleaning up the mess iMovie leaves behind).

#!/usr/bin/env python
'''
Simple script to remove all directories that match the name:
    /iMovie Temporary Items */  [note the star!]

'''
import os
import fnmatch
import shutil

# tuple of directories to search through (you can add more than one)
DIRS = ('/Volumes/leaker-damon/tps/Videos/',)

for directory in DIRS:
    for root, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(directory):
        for directory in dirnames:
            if fnmatch.fnmatch(directory,'iMovie Temporary Items *'):
                shutil.rmtree(os.path.join(root,directory))

make this more better

Am interested to hear how other people have been handling this — this approach certainly isn’t perfect, but it seems to work (for now).

Install MacPorts

First, we’ll need to make sure you have “XCode Tools” installed on your Mac — XCode Tools install all the programs needed to build applications from source. It comes standard with all Macs, however, it isn’t installed by default, so you’ll need your installation DVD (or you can download them). From the DVD, go to the “Optional Install” folder and then “XCode Tools” and run the installer package.

Second, we’ll have to download and install the MacPorts from: http://macports.org/install.php. Choose a .dmg disk image for whichever version of OS X you are using.

Third, after MacPorts has been installed, we’ll need to update our PATH variable in the Terminal to be able to find the MacPorts program (which is called port). If you have your own way of doing this, go for it — however, I created a ~/.bash_profile file to accomplish this task. If you don’t already have a profile file, you can do this by entering the following in the terminal (I also added two other common places programs get installed on the command line that save me trouble down the road):

• $ echo "export PATH=/usr/local/bin/:/usr/local/sbin/:/opt/local/bin/:/opt/local/sbin/:$PATH" >> ~/.bash_profile

Restart the Terminal program for these changes to take effect. If this has been accomplished successfully, then you should be able to run (again in the Terminal) the following for a self-update and it should work:

• $ sudo port -v selfupdate

If nothing happens and, instead, you get an error that says: -bash: port: command not found, that means your PATH variable wasn’t set correctly. If this is the first time you are running a command using sudo you’ll get a warning saying something to the effect of: if you don’t know what you are doing, turn back now. Ignore this warning.

What’s Next

With MacPorts installed by itself, nothing much is going to change. But you’ll be able to use it to install open source applications that are very exciting (like lame, flac, ffmpeg, gimp, etc).

This is because, apparently, OpenSSL has a license that is incompatible with Debian’s GPL. Regardless: clear text is bad; encryption is good. And since Ubuntu doesn’t package netatalk with the appropriate encryption support, one must do it oneself.

Updated 05.08.09: Just tested this with Jaunty (09.04) and the package in the repositories works with no extra steps. If you are using an older version of Ubuntu, however, you will want to follow these instructions. Tested with Intrepid Ibex (8.10) as well as: 6.06, 7.04, 7.10, and 8.06.

about this guide

When I first found that Ubuntu’s netatalk package didn’t support encrypted authentication, I tried to compile netatalk from the source. I didn’t get very far. Throwing up my hands in frustration, I spent some more time on google and found some ideas at the Ubuntu Forums. Pulling it all together, with ideas and fixes from comments (below), this is what I came up with (which I think is a lot easier than building from source).

steps to follow

NOTE: If you have already installed netatalk you should remove it before proceeding with a sudo aptitude purge netatalk before you get going.

• sudo aptitude update
• mkdir -p ~/src/netatalk
• cd ~/src/netatalk
• sudo aptitude install cracklib2-dev libssl-dev
• apt-get source netatalk
• sudo apt-get build-dep netatalk
• cd netatalk-2.0.3
• sudo DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=ssl dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc
• sudo debi
• echo "netatalk hold" | sudo dpkg --set-selections

The basic trend of this set of operations is to: create a directory where all the messy files can be stored, download necessary packages, get the netatalk source, compile the source with the ssl option, install the package, then tell Ubuntu never to update the package (because if it did, it would break).

Settings for the netatalk service can be found on your Ubuntu machine at /etc/netatalk/. There are a couple configuration files in there with instructions. Good luck.

configuration files

One of the first changes I make after installing netatalk is to disable some of the services that I don’t need running (and start those that I do). To do this, I edit: /etc/default/netatalk, changing the daemons that run so that it ends up looking like this (which allows netatlk to restart a lot quicker without the atalkd daemon — which is a holdover from pre-OS X times):

# Set which daemons to run (papd is dependent upon atalkd):
ATALKD_RUN=no
PAPD_RUN=no
CNID_METAD_RUN=no
AFPD_RUN=yes
TIMELORD_RUN=no
A2BOOT_RUN=no

These are the settings I am using since I only need the afp file server — one thing to note, however, is that if you want to use the dbd databashe scheme rather than cdb, you need to set CNID_METAD_RUN to yes.  cdb is supposed to be faster, while dbd is supposed to be “corruption-proof”.  You can read it about in the docs.

After you’ve saved changes to this configuration file, run the following to restart netatalk:

• sudo /etc/init.d/netatalk restart

other tips and tricks

Here are a couple other thoughts and pointers that I’ve picked up over the years …

multiple afp servers running on the same network

I never thought much of it, but I did notice: if you have two different servers on your network running netatalk, you are unable to login to both of them at the same time. JET posted a solution to this and it works flawlessly. It has changed my life.

multiple network interfaces causing errors

Update (9/24/07 & 10/22/07): I’ve noticed a few people mentioning they get an error when compiling and/or starting netatalk (from ubuntuforums.org as well). Folks with more than one available network adapter (like eth1 and eth2, or virtual adapters created by vmware) seem to run an error when they compile and during runtime . During compile time you might have have an error that ends in:

• dpkg: error processing netatalk (--install):
• subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
• Errors were encountered while processing:
• netatalk
• debi: debpkg -i failed

After this, you would probably get an error at runtime that looked like:

• Starting Netatalk services (this will take a while): nbp_rgstr: Connection timed out

Tim Pope wrote a suggested fix in the comments below that should eliminate the conflict between the multiple adapters. I only have one adapter myself (and don’t use vmware) so I haven’t had a chance to try it yet myself. Let me know if this works for you as well.