Upgrading my Powerbook to Tiger was about as smooth as it gets. I took the opportunity to perform a full reformat (in an attempt to clean some disc errors I’ve been getting) and the whole process was pretty pleasurable. Things went slightly awry last night, however, when I performed a routine upgrade on our local Debian Sarge file server and was blessed with a new version of Samba.

It would appear that there’s some incompatibility between Tiger and this new version of samba (which I think is 3.0.14), and I can no longer connect to the server from a mac. From my old iMac running Panther, and from various Windows machines the new version of samba is fine. sigh.

So I’ve installed netatalk on the server to get us up and running again, but I really don’t want to maintain two different types of share records for different clients. Samba was fine, and I want it back. Any ideas out there?

Anyway, this got me thinking about how running mac clients and linux servers should be a trivially easy combination to get working nicely, and how for a lot of folk should be a good solution for a simple home or office file/print/web server setup. I’d love to be able to splash the cash and buy an Xserve and run OS X Server here at home, but frankly it’s overkill. I’m sure it’s overkill for most home or small office setups.

And I can do this for free with linux. Linux has solutions for netatalk, Rendezvous Bonjour and insanely well trodden paths for shared printing with CUPS and so on. Running linux on an old PC as a straightforward file or media server should be an easy, cheap solution. Getting all this stuff working right is one thing. Getting it configured with the correct settings and package versions to happily talk with the latest version of OS X is quite another. On the whole it requires far more effort than can be expect of most, even technically competent, users.

What I’d like to see is a specialized linux distro, dedicated to working more or less as an alternative to OS X Server for small networks. It would be based on god’s own debian, and out of the box would run netatalk, Bonjour zeroconf networking, webdav support for syncing and iCal publishing and all the services that make sense to OS X-based client machines.

Day-to-day configuration would need to be done via a web interface (perhaps a skinned webmin would do, at a push). More adventurous users could fall back to ssh. I see no need for a visual environment if the install is easy and the web interface strong.

In the course of a rainy Saturday afternoon, a reasonably competent user should be able to install themselves a fully functioning file and media server and have it running smoothly with their macs – without the loss of hair – and still be able to make it down the pub in time for The Big Game.

That’s the vision. Anyone out there got the skills to help make it happen?