Tomasz Korwel
programmer, administrator, engineer – my everyday fights with reality

Today when I woke up my MacBook greeted me with very unpleasant alert:

The network backup disk does not support the required AFP features.

It turnes out that during the upgrade to Lion Apple used their newest set of commands that were not compatible with stable netatalk package in Ubuntu.
To get my network storage to work again I had to upgrade to the latest netatalk 2.2.beta4.

First download all needed files from Ubuntu’s repositories

wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/73070555/netatalk_2.2~beta4-1_amd64.deb
wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/74978789/libgcrypt11_1.5.0-1_amd64.deb
wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/75629511/multiarch-support_2.13-9ubuntu3_amd64.deb
wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/72120162/libgpg-error0_1.10-0.3ubuntu1_amd64.deb
wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/74358655/libdb5.1_5.1.25-11_amd64.deb


Then install it:


dpkg -i multiarch-support_2.13-9ubuntu3_amd64.deb
dpkg -i libgpg-error0_1.10-0.3ubuntu1_amd64.deb
dpkg -i libgcrypt11_1.5.0-1_amd64.deb
dpkg -i libdb5.1_5.1.25-11_amd64.deb
dpkg -i netatalk_2.2~beta4-1_amd64.deb


I’ve chosen to keep old version of configuration files, the only notable difference was that now afpd.conf lists -tcp -noddp options as defaults. I added them to my list. Quick restart of netatalk daemon and voila – Time Machine works again.

Recently I came to the point when free space on my virtual drive under VMWare was almost nonexistent. Usually it doesn’t bother me at all but I wanted to watch a movie from Netflix and all I got was information that Netflix’s player requires at least 1GB of hard drive to play anything at all.

Unfortunately disk size option in virtual machine settings was in my case grayed out so I couldn’t do it directly. After quick search in Google I have found that there is a command line tool already included that allows you to do so. All you have to do is run this little command:

cd /Applications /VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS/
./diskTool -X 15Gb /VmWare/Windows\ XP.vmwarevm/Windows\ XP.vmdk

Be sure to pt the path to the actual vmdk file. After a minute or so I saw

Grow : 100% (10485760/10485760) done.

And all that left to do was to start the virtual machine and resize partition using partition resizing software of your choice.