Joped.com

I have been using Leopard for about 4 seeds now (Legally). Time Machine used to work over any AFP (including Airport Base Station), NFS and even SMB. When the end of October hit and Leopard was finally released, for unknown reasons Apple removed most of those features.

Now, in order for Time Machine to work your only options either direct drive connected or AFP to another Leopard client or server.

Although connection to another Leopard box via AFP isn’t bad, its doesn’t work for me. I own 2 Macbook Pros and a Linux server. I had originally planned on using the Linux box as my server for Time Machine. Since I already had AFP running, it would be easy to drop in a new volume for it.

The reasons for Apple doing this is quite unknown and really drives me nuts. Now, I am forced to do one of the following work arounds. None of them are very appealing, and none I have gotten to work yet.

1. Find work around for backing up over SMB or AFP. Although I would love this one to happen, I have yet to see any progress. AFP isn’t being actively developed, so there is an even less chance then SMB. The strange thing is, you can’t even mount a Tiger AFP mount which doesn’t make any sense. I wonder what they changed in the protocol.
2. Find a work around for Airport Extreme Base stations or a fix from Apple. There is a small work around for getting Timemachine to backup to it. However, the Time Machine interface doesn’t work with it and its unstable. I could put together some simple scripts to make sure my mount point is valid at all times I am connected to my LAN.
3. Install Leopard in VMWare. (I am not interested in talking about the EULA. I purchased a Family Pack and I disagree that Apple has the right to limit what machine you can install it on. Its like aftermarket parts) I have been working on trying to figure this one out. I can’t get the image to boot, been trying for a week now. I have posted on a few message boards, this is feeling like a dead end. To top things off, my Linux server is SSE2.
4. Similar to #3, I was thinking that I could purchasing an ultra cheap bare bones system to run it. It doesn’t have to be powerful, just needs to handle Time Machine and serve iTunes to my AppleTV.
5. The AppleTV is another cheap system I might be able to install it to. I don’t think it has SSE3, so it might be a serious problem. I have heard of getting Tiger to run on it.
6. Find very cheap G4 on craigslist, I haven’t been able to find much under $300. I am trying to do it for no more then $250. I haven’t had much luck with eBay either. Not to mention, I don’t know much about older Macs.

There is also the big issue of I can restore from Time Machine after these work arounds are put in place. Once I find a working idea, I am going to test it. My plan is to install Leopard to an external drive and backup to the network mount. From that point, I am going to delete my test partition. Will all my test data be there ?

I will try and post my progress.