Post #2421361

2026-04-29 18:10 UTC

@smallsco@oldbytes.space @theirongiant@hachyderm.io @nikdoof@social.doofnet.uk indeed, editing the wrong config file is a recurring pitfall (that I myself have fallen into more often than I like to admit) which is why I made sure there was a section on this in the Troubleshooting guide the #netatalk build system does default to /usr/local/etc for config files, because this is the FHS compliant location for user installed software, and this has been the case since at least netatalk v3.2.0 (when we moved to meson) a downstream packager can then customize this location to comply with the filesystem scheme of their particular OS distribution, which Debian does for example with /etc/netatalk this is why you typically get totally different software installation paths with a binary package vs. building from source code, which can be obnoxious but an unavoidable quirk of Unix-like operating systems that you have to get used to if you take a look at the Netatalk Compilation guide: https://netatalk.io/compilation the Debian build example includes "-Dwith-pkgconfdir-path=/etc/netatalk" so that you get the customary config file path on that particular OS HTH!

Replies (1)

@theirongiant@hachyderm.io 2026-04-29 22:45

@dmark@hachyderm.io @smallsco@oldbytes.space @nikdoof@social.doofnet.uk - I wonder if it might help newbies to have netatalk write a "note" log event to the effect of "Reading configuration file: /path/to/afp.conf", or perhaps logging a "warn" event if the config file is in a default unaltered state. The first thing I did was run "journalctl -f" to determine what netatalk was doing. I imagine others might be so inclined to tail -f /var/log/messages (or /syslog) — whatever their OS'es default log path is. OR ... make the default config file inoperable (comment everything out) until the user makes definitive changes to define a share. A blank config / commented config should cause netatalk not to run.

Open ##2421362