Appletalk Routing in 2025

As I've continued to play around with retro computing environments, based largely in virtual labs built with various incarnations of Qemu, I've run into some situations where I either needed or wanted to route some native Appletalk servers over IP networks, where Appletalk routers don't exist in between - or, at the very least, the routers don't have Appletalk services enabled, and I am not in control of the routers. It's also possible that I'm trying to contain my ancient computing environments enough that I both don't expose my overall environment to needless risk, and that I keep an InfoSec team happy that my activities are not doing that. So, how is one to overcome the obstacles of Layer 3 segmentation and Appletalk routing in 2025?

Simple: Linux. Okay, of course Linux - that's obvious, let's get more specific.

The biggest item you'll need - running on Linux, of course - is Netatalk. Netatalk is an open source Apple compatibility software suite for Linux, specializing in supporting some of the older Mac technologies, most notably the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP). In fact, version 3.x and 4.x of Netatalk really only support AFP. However, if you go back to the 2.x release, which still has some level of active maintenance on it (git code was updated in October 2024), you'll find it supports quite a wide range of Apple services - beyond AFP, it also supports printing (PAP), time synchronization (timelord), and, the one we're most interested in, Appletalk (atalk). Appletalk was a network protocol similar to Internet Protocol (IP) and IPX/SPX, and included features like network and node addressing that allowed it to inter-connect Apple systems over a wide range of networks, distances, media types, etc.

Several vendors included Appletalk routing in their products, as well. Cisco routers had it built in for years - and may still have the feature present (I haven't been on a Cisco router in a decade or more, so I'm not sure about that). Also, notably, Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Server had a service that could be installed called "Services for Macintosh," which included, among other things (more on those in a future post), the capability to set up Windows to create Appletalk Zones (the equivalent of IP subnets) and route between them. Ultimately IP won out over the likes of Appletalk (and IPX/SPX, and a few others), but not before many organizations built out rather large Appletalk networks connecting Macintosh as well as other Apple platforms together with this protocol.

Reliving the Glory Days

I've recently been inspired by a couple of YouTube channels - The 8-bit Guy, The Serial Port and clabretro - to relive the glory days of my youth and the infancy of the Internet. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s when the Internet was just getting going - when the folks creating web sites on the likes of GeoCities could create sites every bit as good as major corporations, when e-mail was cutting edge, and when AOL Instant Messenger was how kids spent their free time. Those were the glory days.

I have a lot of nostalgia about that time, and some memories tied to how I explored this new digital, online world, and, as I've watched those YouTube channels explore some of the really fun things like setting up a dial-up ISP, or configuring a Sun Sparc server, I had a strong desire to recreate some of the things that I used to do, as well.

And, of course, the question becomes: How can I make my retelling of my story unique? After all, those other YouTubers are already making those videos, so why should anyone pay attention to another guy doing much the same? Maybe no one will pay attention, and that's fine - the journey is primarily for me. But, in case other folks are interesting, I did come up with some ways that my recollecting of my experiences might be unique:

• I intend to write it out as much as possible, and I don't even know if I'll make videos. Maybe I will at some point - that's never really been my thing, but, who knows.
• I intend to write out the steps in great detail, so that others can reproduce it.
• While many of the other channels are focused on procuring real hardware - things like Cisco 2600 series routers, line cards, terminal servers, Sun servers, etc. - I intend to recreate it with as much realism as possible in a virtual world. While that may sound like it isn't really reliving the past, I think it may be more accessible for others, and, hey, it's what I can do - I don't have the resources or attic/basement/closet space to procure a bunch of old hardware.
• The other reason it's okay to do it virtually is that my nostalgia has more to do with how it looked to me, the end user, and not how it was implemented by a provider. While I certainly plan to dig into the back-end details of setting up proxy, mail, dial-up servers, etc., I didn't do any of that as a primary school kid in the 90s. I was just a user, and I'll be more focused on the items that help replicate what it was like as a user.

In addition to replicating and reliving my early Information Age experiences, I'd also like to explore some of the technologies that I was not given access to. I was a user of early Apple production (IIe, Mac Classic, Performa) and then early IBM PC-compatible platforms (DOS 6 + Windows 3.1, Windows 95/98, XP), and some Intel-based Linux distributions (Red Hat 6). My exploration of some of the retro YouTube channels has opened my eyes to some of the platforms that, for a combination of reasons, I completely missed - things like the Commodore platform, BASIC, OS/2. Many of these are available as downloads and can be run on Intel-compatible hardware, either directly or in readily-available emulators (Qemu).