netatalk problems in connection with OSX as router

[Alexander Holst]

Hi every body,

I recently setup a Mac OSX 10.1.5 | 10.1.4 Server for NetBooting 
purposes. In order to reduce network traffic, our lab is segmented into 
5 subnets, all routed by the Mac OSX box. In order to get AppleTalk 
routing activated for the NetBoot clients, I enabled AppleTalk 
SeedRouting according to Apple's KBase article # 106453, to get the OSX 
box act as an AppleTalk seed router for all segments.

So far, IP and AppleTalk routing work fine - with one exeption: the 
NetBoot clients can not mount any AppleShare servers through the 
chooser, running netatalk [the netatalk servers are on another subnet 
than the NetBoot Clients, so every request is routed via the OSX box]. 
All servers are seen in the chooser by all clients, but double-clicking 
a netatalk server times out with an error message that there was no 
response from the server! Entering the servers IP address or its fqdn in 
the choosers IP button brings up the login window and the volumes of 
that server can be mounted relyably.

This only applies to netatalk servers. We have an old ANS running AIX + 
Helios EtherShare as well as other OSX servers. None of which cause 
similar trouble, they all can be mounted through the chooser as usual 
from any machine.

Netatalk servers on the same wire as a Mac client work as usual, only 
clients whose traffic is routed through the OSX box show this behaviour. 
The version of netatalk does not seem to affect this, as we have 
different versions running, [up to the current YDL-2.3 distro version], 
all of them behave the same way. Is it possibly due to encrypted 
passwords, that might get scrambled by traversing the OSX box?

Is that a known issue or is there something else to be modified on the 
OSX box in order to get AppleTalk routing enabled correctly?


Any help appreciated.

TIA,
Alex



Alexander Holst
Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences
<holst@fh-pforzheim.de>
ph: +49 [0]7231 28-6837
fx: +49 [0]7231 28-6040