alt Hacker NewsSMB improvements (https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...), I've moved to borg, but depending on how this goes may give time machine another try:
- Add opt-in Apple Time Machine support
Implement the AAPL negotiation and related Finder, stream,
COPYCHUNK, sparse-file, CHANGE_NOTIFY, and RPC compatibility
required for Time Machine shares, allowing macOS backupd to use
ksmbd for backups
Still sucks that it has to be reverse-engineered
Replies
Over my life I have found that with any Apple technology it may work great with anything outside Apple's control... Until it doesn't, usually out of nowhere.
My father is mostly on Apple and tries to use his iPad as a PC, ie with files and "the filesystem", he tries to get out of using extra iCloud for pictures (using Proton, or he asks me about Immich, or he wants to use an external HDD, or use Synology Photos and backup). He's mostly on the iPad + keyboard because it's a nicely managed device update-wise and "what I can install"-wise, virus-wise.
But I recent told him: Just give up. Buy (rent!) the storage, you are too depended on me, there is always something with the non-Apple solutions. Yes, your iTunes library is a mess on the filesystem, just don't look at it through anything else than "Music". Yes, Proton Drive eats 400 GB of your iPad storage now, I don't know how to trim that regularly. I'm sorry, it's either Linux and I can help set some things up, or full Apple. Choose. His current mixed, "trying to get best-of-both-worlds", approach is just pure unexpected pain, every time again.
Edit: I also have an iPad, it does work for me, but where my father is trying to use his iPad as a central, primary device (the hub), for me it is a client (spoke) of my own infra. Apps get access to information and I never use Apple services for anything. So indeed, Immich, Proton, Home Assistant, government and banking apps, etc. My iPad is throw-away: If it dies, it dies... I buy a new one, log into all (self-hosed) services and I'm 100% back up and running. Doing the same for my father is also pain, because his Home Assistant will have issues, or his Immich instance, and it's real work to fix, and he won't tell me for months if it does not work and work piles up. So, I tell him to surrender to Apple... It die a little inside.
Time Machine support has been working on TrueNAS Scale, just via one checkbox on a SMB share config, for years. I thought it was just something in a share config that was always there. Now I wonder how did they do it.
Hmmm...this is separate from using SAMBA?
I tried setting up SAMBA by itself (on Debian) for Time Machine, but for it to work it seems to want Avahi running for mDNS; the problem is there is some weird bug or maybe user-related blooper where it collides with itself from time to time, leading to local DNS weirdness
It doesn’t have to be reverse engineered. Apple publishes the source of its SMB client licensed as BSD-4 on GitHub.
https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/SMBClient
I’m not sure where Phoronix/the author got the information that this was reverse-engineered, because the patch doesn’t say that either.
This really makes me sad. They devoted time and effort to support something as locked and as broken as Apple Time Machine. That thing is a bad choice even within a 100% Apple ecosystem.
Gotta say, using SMB with Apple clients is a massive pain in the ass. I imagine a large part of that is just Microsoft cruft, leaving you to deal with limitations designed around Windows. And you don't really have another option after Apple deprecated AFP.
> Still sucks that it has to be reverse-engineered
With AI and stuff like rea.tools does that really matter anymore?
Let's just accept that this is the new norm: Giant companies who had over 20 years to open their shit up, chose to be ass about it and refused, and now we can just take it. Screw them.
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I'm not sure if ksmbd still makes all that much sense. A user-space daemon can saturate almost any network link using a single CPU core. And the attack surface... if you control ksmbd, you immediately own the machine.