Originally published by The Register
Apple’s old backup boxes only speak AFP and SMB1, but NetBSD under the hood gives them one last shot
The next major release of macOS looks likely to remove Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) support, stopping Time Capsules from working… butlifeFOSS, uh, finds a way.
The current version of macOS “Tahoe” 26.4already has network Time Machine issues, especially for folksusing Apple Time Capsules. It looks like macOS 27 may completely remove the network protocol they need. However, the Time Capsules run NetBSD under the hood, and that means that the FOSS world has been able tocome up with a workaround. It’s calledTimeCapsuleSMB, and it aims to keep older Time Capsules usable with modern macOS.
It’s eight months sinceApple released macOS 26, and the company’s annual release schedule means that macOS 27 is looming. Although Cupertino hasn’t told the world much about it yet, it is warning sysadmins to “prepare your network environment for stricter security requirements.”
Reading the bulletin, we found it ratherclixby: while it firmly warns that security checks will become stricter, it doesn’t spell out what products will change or how. Happily, there are elder Mac gurus out there who interpret Apple’s sometimes Delphic utterances, andHoward Oakleyis one of the greatest. In a post aboutnetworking changes coming in macOS 27, he translates that it will requireTLS1.2 or above. (The Registerexplained TLS back in 2002, and version 1.2 appeared about six years later.)
However, he also warns that it could mean the end of AFP, which is basically Appletalk-over-TCP/IP version 3.4. AppleTalk was the Mac network protocol for file sharing from System 6 onward. In 2013,OS X 10.9 “Mavericks"made Microsoft’s SMB the default file-sharing protocol in place of AFP, and it looks like AFP now faces the ax: it wasofficially deprecated in macOS 15.5. To be fair, macOS 26 Macsstarted displaying a warningto Time Capsule users nearly a year ago.
Apple introduced thefirst model of Time Capsulein 2008, and thefifth-generation version in 2013. The companydiscontinued the whole AirPort product linein 2018.
All generations only support AFP and SMB version 1. That’s the original version that appeared with LAN Manager in 1987, and wereported on Samba dropping SMB1back in 2022.
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The good news is that even if Apple kills its original file-sharing protocol next year, the FOSS community is on the case and won’t let working kit die. The Time Capsule hardware is essentially a box containing a Wi-Fi access point and a hard disk, and an Arm chip with just enough software to share that HDD as network-attached storage. Apple didn’t write this software from scratch: it picked up and customized NetBSD for the job. The first four generations of Time Capsule (flat square boxes) run NetBSD 4, and the fifth-gen devices – the tall tower-shaped models from 2013 onward – run NetBSD 6.
That gave Microsoft’sJames Changan opening. Since the devices run NetBSD, it’s possible to compile a newer version of Samba, and copy it somewhere that the tiny embedded Arm computer can find it. Teaching such old kit a new trick is never that easy, though, and he faced a number of challenges, which he details in thedesign section of the project README. Among them are machines that only have about 900 KB of available disk space – less than 1 MB – and a tiny 16 MB RAMdisk. He settled onSamba 4.8, which dates back to 2018, the same year Apple discontinued the product line, but which includes the necessary Time Machine support, via a module named vfs_fruit.
The TimeCapsuleSMB docs are worth a read. We found his descriptions of how he worked around the hardware’s very significant limitations impressive. Notably, on the early models, you’ll need to manually reload the software every time you reboot the Time Capsule. The final model can do this automatically.
Don’t fret at the thought of backing up to such an elderly spinning hard disk: iFixit has descriptions of how to replace the drive in both theearly modelsand thelater ones too. ®
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