Networking OS9.2.2 with OSX 10.6.8

[Higgy32]

Has anyone any experience with a AFP NAS that can be mounted by OS 9.2.2 & OSX 10.6.8 simultaneously?

Background:
Computers: 1 Mirror Door G4 and a 1 Mac Pro Xeon 2006 OSX 10.6.8.
I use Sonic Solutions DVD Creator for our DVD authoring. Sonic stopped developing their pro DVD application on the Macintosh back in 2002 which left our authoring stations stuck in OS 9. DVD SP isn't an option.
From moving out of the office studio in London and going remote I set up a 2TB scratch disk on my Mac Pro for all the encodes, menu graphics and authoring scripts which connected to my G4 via ethernet, effectively using the Pro as my authoring server.
Up until last week I was using Leopard 10.5.8 on the Pro. OS 9 connected (via chooser -> AppleShare -> server IP address) to all the drives in my Pro effortlessly using it's IP address, I could pick and choose which disks to mount onto the desktop for Sonic DVD Creator to read and write to. All running AOK.

It was about time I did a "clean install" on the Pro, I don't have a disc copy of Leopard so I ordered a copy of Snow Leopard so I could wipe the system drive and start from fresh and updated to the latest version. Which I did. All good.
Then, and only then did I find out that chooser (OS 9) now couldn't connect to mac pro via AFP because Snow Leopard now uses an incompatible version of AFP, to quote error message "This file server uses and incompatible version of the AFP protocol. You cannot connect to it"
BUGGER.

After a couple of days researching I'm still a little unsure of my options. All I need is a disk that can be mounted in OS9 and OSX at the same time, and as far as I know this can't be done with the disk sitting in a Mac running OSX 10.6.8.

My questions are:

• Does anyone know of a simple (software) work around without spending much? I heard I could use a FTP connection using Fetch on the G4, but I'm not sure how to configure it and knowing Sonic it probably won't like that much...
• or for example if I buy a QNAP or Synology NAS will I be able to enter a IP address in chooser and mount the drive? Can't find any info to confirm this on their websites (fair enough I guess, why would they test it with OS9?)
• I think I read somewhere that OSX 6.3 still carries a OS9 compatible AFP? which means re-installing Snow Leopard and never updating.

Thank you for reading.

Alan

 

[Madd the Sane]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Most third-party NASes use netatalk. Netatalk is an AppleTalk layer and AFP server for Unices such as Linux. Newer versions of Netatalk don't have AppleTalk enabled by default, but you can still connect using TCP/IP.

 

[Higgy32]

Networking OS9.2.2 with OSX 10.6.8

Hello Madd The Sane,

Thanks for your reply.
I did read about Netatalk but got a bit lost with it.
Question:
Do I only need to get Netatalk installed on one/ both machine(s) and configured and use the current scratch disk in my Pro or do I need to buy a NAS + Netatalk?
Netatalk is just software right?
I'm diving into the world of Netatalk right now.

thanks for your help,
Alan

 

[Madd the Sane]

Netatalk is software. Netatalk is open source, thus free. You can't install it on the Mac: Apple's native AFP server would conflict with it. Netatalk is only the AFP server; it doesn't include a client. If you're not too squeamish, you can get it set up under Linux. Most NASes that have Mac support will have Netatalk already installed, as well as a web interface to configure it.

 

[Higgy32]

Right I see, I need to get myself a mac friendly NAS and get it configured correctly so OS9 & X are happy with it.

Thank you for your time.
Alan