Well... Apple has further killed the use of PowerPC

[mectojic]

Just a sad rant post to reflect on how PowerPC gets harder to use at time goes on...
Finally decided to update my home server from a 2010 Mac Mini to a 2022 M2 Mini. Upgrade was worth it, as I'm also going from HDD to SSD server and the speed is nice.

But now, running MacOS14 Sonoma, I've lost all access AFP and SMB1 – my PPC Macs are basically locked out entirely.

Not that I've been using PPC much lately, but still, this feels like the final nail in the coffin. Any connectivity I had to my modern devices is practically dead now. At least in the past I could still get on the Wifi, access my Server, and watch movies, listen to music, work on text docs and PDFs I put on the Server. Now, it's either USB sticks or nothing.

I still using the monitors/keyboard hardware from the time, perhaps my last link to the PPC days. Otherwise, my oldest working
machine now is probably going to be Early Intel Macs, which works with SMB2. If anyone has workarounds, I'd love to hear them. I have a spare Intel Mac Mini, I don't know if it can somehow bridge my M2's server, but I'm no expert on any of this. (P.S. I don't know anything about FTP and don't really want to go down that path.)

 

[Slartibart]

you can share via sshfs/FUSE.
Regarding the particulars mentioned: you tried to connect to it from your Sonoma box not as smb://…, but as cifs://[local.IP.addess.of.historic.mac]? (no Sonoma mac currently here to check)
Or, as additionally for the other way round, install samba3 via macports and connect to the Mac from via a samba3 command line syntax.
Or install a ppc linux.

Or use ftp. 🥹

 

[Arctic Moose]

(P.S. I don't know anything about FTP and don't really want to go down that path.)

I needed to get some stuff off a Power Macintosh 9600 running Mac OS 9 a while back, setting up ftp took all of five minutes.

 

[mectojic]

you can share via sshfs/FUSE.
Regarding the particulars mentioned: you tried to connect to it from your Sonoma box not as smb://…, but as cifs://[local.IP.addess.of.historic.mac]? (no Sonoma mac currently here to check)
Or, as additionally for the other way round, install samba3 via macports and connect to the Mac from via a samba3 command line syntax.
Or install a ppc linux.

Or use ftp. 🥹

I don't know how to do any of these things. Are there guides? For FTP, for instance?

 

[B S Magnet]

I don't know how to do any of these things. Are there guides? For FTP, for instance?

File-transfer protocol, or FTP, is straightforward when thinking about why and how it was created: to transfer files between remote systems when other means of transferring files (like downloading from an http-based web page, which came much later) didn’t yet exist.

FTP was, for a long time, the easiest way to move multiple files across distances in both directions. It was what we used before “the web cloud” (sang to the overture of “The Simpsons” theme song), like Dropbox, iCloud, and Google Drive, came about.

By default, Mac OS X/macOS has always had an in-built capability of accessing FTP servers (which, as servers, are no different than AFP servers or SMB servers), but that tends to be only for reading/pulling files from the FTP server, not for writing back up to the server. For example, I can connect to an FTP server from Finder (Cmd-K).

In this case, I’m connecting to Adobe’s public ftp server as a “guest” (so yes, read-only):

Note I’m doing the above with Mojave, but the same works with Tiger on PowerPC:

To write, or send upstream, to an FTP server, this is where an FTP client/application comes in. An FTP client readily allows for both reading (retrieving) and writing (sending) to an FTP server.

Fetch was the longstanding FTP client for Mac for, basically, a couple of decades. In the OS X era, forward, Transmit took up that mantle (note: the Transmit link goes to the pre-OS X versions; OS X/macOS versions are still posted on their company site).

The thing about using FTP on a local (i.e., home) network is it’s kind of a sledgehammer when an ice pick, such as AFP, SMB, or NFS, would work better. Until, say, Firefox 88, you could even type in an ftp:// address and it would display the contents right inside the browser. There even used to be an ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/ location, which now, idiosyncratically, is at https://ftp.mozilla.org/ .

Unfortunately, this iteration of the corporation known as Apple does not care for us to continue to use our systems (well, their systems) in this manner. They would rather we, the end user, rely on iCloud, AirDrop, and proprietary services involving a “MitM” remote server (which just happens to be Apple’s, or Dropbox’s, or Google’s) — even for times when we simply want to move a file from our computer from the laptop on our lap to the desktop in the next room.

Hopefully this helps to de-mystify FTP for you.

 

[eyoungren]

I can't offer any immediate step by step solutions to you, but I can absolutely tell you that AFP works on M2 Macs. My work Mac is a 2023 M2 MacBook Pro and while I have freaking given it the old college try because Apple has deprecated AFP, I am forced to use it because it is now the far more stable solution in connection to the NAS at work.

We use a VPN and prior to all four drives on the NAS dying in late November everything was fine. But once IT replaced the drives and did some updates and tweaking, SMB is unstable. There are still issues with AFP and I am forced to copy files to my work Mac, edit them there and then copy them back - but AFP works. And those issues are not specific to the M2 Mac. They also happen to the older 2015 work issued MBP running High Sierra.

On my current, but low priority list, is trying to get SMB1 to work on the MBP. I don't know if it's the NAS that is stopping SMB1 connections, but I cannot connect using CIFS (which is SMB1). My limited Googling suggests that there is a way to get SMB1 turned back on. I just haven't gone down that rabbit hole yet.

Now…I am also connecting to the other Macs on my home network via AFP as well. Despite Apple deprecating AFP, I've come to discover that where it concerns SSDs, AFP seems to be the better protocol. I've had no issues. My G4 is sharing a 6TB drive to the home network via AFP and SMB and while I'm confident that I have connected to it in the past with the M2, I will verify that on Monday when the M2 turns itself on for work.

But yeah…not having any issues using AFP on a M2 MBP.

Oh! And the M2 is on Sonoma 14.1. Just to point that out.

 

[Bigwaff]

my PPC Macs are basically locked out entirely.

Are your PPC Macs running Mac OS 9 or X?

 

[eyoungren]

Are your PPC Macs running Mac OS 9 or X?

Yeah, that might be the difference. Speaking for myself (not OP) all my PowerPC systems are OS X.

I wonder if installing a copy of DAVE might work here. That'd give an OS9/OS X Mac the industry standard SMB instead of Apple's old and incomplete version of it. Ironically, it'd make the older Mac consistent with the newer ones, when it was Apple that spent years resisting implementation of the industry accepted SMB standard.

 

[Arctic Moose]

Unfortunately, this iteration of the corporation known as Apple does not care for us to continue to use our systems (well, their systems) in this manner.

Fortunately, this iteration of Apple cares enough about security to discourage use of protocols that transmit credentials in clear text to remove the applications that use them.

Note that ssh/scp/sftp is still included in a default install, so promoting third party cloud storage is hardly the motivation.

 

[B S Magnet]

Fortunately, this iteration of Apple cares enough about security to discourage use of protocols that transmit credentials in clear text to remove the applications that use them.

For any extant tech company to say they “care enough about security” is tantamount to saying a shark cares enough about respiring in water when all fish do just that.

Rather, it’s that Apple, at least with their own local file-transfer protocol, AFP, didn’t bother to spend the effort to update the protocol with encryption — whether encryption of login data or total encryption of the data moved within that protocol. They just gave up and, however reluctantly, adopted SMB3.

Note that ssh/scp/sftp is still included in a default install, so promoting third party cloud storage is hardly the motivation.

You know, I know, and most of the folks who are participating on this thread or are regulars to this subforum, are cognizant how a super-majority share of file transfers completed on currently supported or “vintage” Mac models aren’t using ssh, sftp, scp, or even smb3 to move those files. They’re using AirDrop. They’re using their subscription iCloud drive. They’re using some other cloud service, where the file doesn’t go directly to the intended recipient, but to a corporate intermediary as a by-way (which, frankly, raises a whole other class of security topics for another discussion).

 

[za9ra22]

Just a sad rant post to reflect on how PowerPC gets harder to use at time goes on...
Finally decided to update my home server from a 2010 Mac Mini to a 2022 M2 Mini. Upgrade was worth it, as I'm also going from HDD to SSD server and the speed is nice.

But now, running MacOS14 Sonoma, I've lost all access AFP and SMB1 – my PPC Macs are basically locked out entirely.

Not that I've been using PPC much lately, but still, this feels like the final nail in the coffin. Any connectivity I had to my modern devices is practically dead now. At least in the past I could still get on the Wifi, access my Server, and watch movies, listen to music, work on text docs and PDFs I put on the Server. Now, it's either USB sticks or nothing.

I still using the monitors/keyboard hardware from the time, perhaps my last link to the PPC days. Otherwise, my oldest working
machine now is probably going to be Early Intel Macs, which works with SMB2. If anyone has workarounds, I'd love to hear them. I have a spare Intel Mac Mini, I don't know if it can somehow bridge my M2's server, but I'm no expert on any of this. (P.S. I don't know anything about FTP and don't really want to go down that path.)

I suspect that getting on for 20 years since the last PPC Macs, Apple probably aren't really doing much to further kill the use of them - they're just not directly supporting these, which is hardly a surprise.

Speaking as someone who uses old Macs a lot, there are a number of ways to move data around between them and modern Macs - even floppy disks still work. Typically though, on my modern Macs (M1 MacBook Air and iMac) I run QuickFTP (a simple FTP server app), and on network equipped vintage Macs, I run Fetch v4 (a basic FTP client).

QuickFTP is easy to set up, and only needs to be actually running to then use Fetch 4 to log into it and move files either way. Fetch can be used for external sources such as macintoshgarden.org too, so with a bit of patience can actually help obtain and deploy vintage software in addition to moving files.

It may not be your preference, but FTP is at least one means to maintain connectivity, and in this kind of arrangement, is remarkably simple to set up and maintain.

 

[erikkfi]

Rather, it’s that Apple, at least with their own local file-transfer protocol, AFP, didn’t bother to spend the effort to update the protocol with encryption

Wouldn't adding encryption now be likely to break backwards compatibility?

 

[dmr727]

Sadly I feel my PPC machines have joined their 68K brethren and have reached the point where I can no longer keep them secure, so they've all been relegated to hobbiest usage only. On the bright side it really simplifies choosing software to use - FTP (Fetch FTW!) is fantastic and easy from System 6 on up.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I can't offer any immediate step by step solutions to you, but I can absolutely tell you that AFP works on M2 Macs. My work Mac is a 2023 M2 MacBook Pro and while I have freaking given it the old college try because Apple has deprecated AFP, I am forced to use it because it is now the far more stable solution in connection to the NAS at work.

We use a VPN and prior to all four drives on the NAS dying in late November everything was fine. But once IT replaced the drives and did some updates and tweaking, SMB is unstable. There are still issues with AFP and I am forced to copy files to my work Mac, edit them there and then copy them back - but AFP works. And those issues are not specific to the M2 Mac. They also happen to the older 2015 work issued MBP running High Sierra.

On my current, but low priority list, is trying to get SMB1 to work on the MBP. I don't know if it's the NAS that is stopping SMB1 connections, but I cannot connect using CIFS (which is SMB1). My limited Googling suggests that there is a way to get SMB1 turned back on. I just haven't gone down that rabbit hole yet.

Now…I am also connecting to the other Macs on my home network via AFP as well. Despite Apple deprecating AFP, I've come to discover that where it concerns SSDs, AFP seems to be the better protocol. I've had no issues. My G4 is sharing a 6TB drive to the home network via AFP and SMB and while I'm confident that I have connected to it in the past with the M2, I will verify that on Monday when the M2 turns itself on for work.

But yeah…not having any issues using AFP on a M2 MBP.

Oh! And the M2 is on Sonoma 14.1. Just to point that out.

Ditto - was about to mention this. I leverage an old AirPort Extreme with a few large drives attached for my legacy Macs. These drives are viewable from my PowerPC Macs to my M2 MBP and everything in between.

You might consider a cheap APE as a means to cheaply & quickly standup a AFP NAS setup via the APEs usb2 port.

Legacy NAS via ibookg4 running 10.4.11. And here it is below. As you can see, nothing fancy about it. Just someone’s old junk that I either got for free or was donated to local thrifts and I bought em there. I think all in I probably have $20 in that setup.

Good luck

 

[AlumaMac]

Yeah, that might be the difference. Speaking for myself (not OP) all my PowerPC systems are OS X.

I wonder if installing a copy of DAVE might work here. That'd give an OS9/OS X Mac the industry standard SMB instead of Apple's old and incomplete version of it. Ironically, it'd make the older Mac consistent with the newer ones, when it was Apple that spent years resisting implementation of the industry accepted SMB standard.

Don't think Dave supports SMB2/3.

 

[B S Magnet]

Wouldn't adding encryption now be likely to break backwards compatibility?

Insomuch as an updated AFP providing end-to-end encryption goes, such a theoretical version of AFP would connect to Macs with that level of AFP protocol as end-to-end encryption (let’s call this “AFP2 AFP4”), whereas connecting to a legacy AFP Mac might: A) auto-downgrade, gracefully and quietly, to non-encrypted, without a dialogue box warning the user; or B) having a checkbox option within the File Sharing portion of the Sharing prefPane, allowing the user to choose which types of AFP requests — AFP/AFP2 AFP4 or AFP2 AFP4 only — it would accept or ignore.

 

[erikkfi]

Insomuch as an updated AFP providing end-to-end encryption goes, such a theoretical version of AFP would connect to Macs with that level of AFP protocol as end-to-end encryption (let’s call this “AFP2”), whereas connecting to a legacy AFP Mac might: A) auto-downgrade, gracefully and quietly, to non-encrypted, without a dialogue box warning the user; or B) having a checkbox option within the File Sharing portion of the Sharing prefPane, allowing the user to choose which types of AFP requests — AFP/AFP2 or AFP2 only — it would accept or ignore.

Yeahhh but you know they wouldn’t backwards compatibility test back to PPC Macs. 🤓

 

[eyoungren]

Ditto - was about to mention this. I leverage an old AirPort Extreme with a few large drives attached for my legacy Macs. These drives are viewable from my PowerPC Macs to my M2 MBP and everything in between.

You might consider a cheap APE as a means to cheaply & quickly standup a AFP NAS setup via the APEs usb2 port.

View attachment 2352608
Legacy NAS via ibookg4 running 10.4.11. And here it is below. As you can see, nothing fancy about it. Just someone’s old junk that I either got for free or was donated to local thrifts and I bought em there. I think all in I probably have $20 in that setup.
View attachment 2352610

Good luck

My NAS…2x3TB for one large 6TB share.



AEX. Found at the Goodwill for $20. I don't need it, but I wanted to put it to work so it provides two of my six WiFi networks at home (the ASUS router next to it provides four). I have two more AEX in the garage, part of a $60 purchase that included three Mac Minis (Intel).



And then of course the G4 on Leopard sharing the 6TB drive.



Just my stuff. eBay has been handy for NAS enclosures.

 

[B S Magnet]

Yeahhh but you know they wouldn’t backwards compatibility test back to PPC Macs. 🤓

Had there, at the time when Apple deprecated AFP, been instead an “AFP4” (what I referred to earlier, erroneously, as an “AFP2”, as the final AFP revision was actually AFP 3.4) major revision, this would have happened with the release of Mavericks (which was, as it turned out, when Apple adopted, formally, SMB3 as AFP’s direct successor for a local network file sharing protocol).

So the backward compatibility of, say, an “AFP4”, had one shipped with Mavericks, would have been able to connect with Macs running “legacy” AFP on devices running Mountain Lion, on hardware as recent as retina MBPs shipping with 10.8.x.

AFP was not merely some PowerPC-only straggler, but a LAN-oriented file share protocol for Macs as far back as Apple IIe/IIGS, through the 68K Macs, the PowerPC Macs, and all Intel Macs through at least Ivy Bridge. (It was also possible, via ssh tunnelling, to connect to remote volumes AFP located on a remote server far away from one’s local area network).

As for current macOS builds like Sonoma connecting to AFP servers, those servers have to be on Macs running Catalina or lower.

 

[Arctic Moose]

Rather, it’s that Apple, at least with their own local file-transfer protocol, AFP, didn’t bother to spend the effort to update the protocol with encryption — whether encryption of login data or total encryption of the data moved within that protocol. They just gave up and, however reluctantly, adopted SMB3.

That was the only possible sane decision, AFP needed to go the way of ADB, SCSI and hopefully soon Lightning. An Apple-only protocol has no place in a platform-agnostic environment.

 

[eyoungren]

I guess I need to inform my M2 Mac running Sonoma that it's not supposed to be using AFP?

It has not gotten the message apparently. Still there…use it every day to connect to the NAS at work.

 

[B S Magnet]

I guess I need to inform my M2 Mac running Sonoma that it's not supposed to be using AFP?

Yes, but can you connect to your Sonoma box via AFP to mount one of its volumes on your, say, Mojave Mac Pro?

That was the only possible sane decision, AFP needed to go the way of ADB, SCSI and hopefully soon Lightning. An Apple-only protocol has no place in a platform-agnostic environment.

Uh, you know SMB is an IBM, and later Microsoft creation, correct?

Unlike, say, NFS (which, although a creation of Sun, became an open standard with its own RFC), SMB is as proprietary as AFP. It’s just that SMB was adopted, for interoperability purposes, by Apple, whereas Microsoft declined to do the same for AFP because Microsoft.

 

[mectojic]

I can't offer any immediate step by step solutions to you, but I can absolutely tell you that AFP works on M2 Macs. My work Mac is a 2023 M2 MacBook Pro and while I have freaking given it the old college try because Apple has deprecated AFP, I am forced to use it because it is now the far more stable solution in connection to the NAS at work.

We use a VPN and prior to all four drives on the NAS dying in late November everything was fine. But once IT replaced the drives and did some updates and tweaking, SMB is unstable. There are still issues with AFP and I am forced to copy files to my work Mac, edit them there and then copy them back - but AFP works. And those issues are not specific to the M2 Mac. They also happen to the older 2015 work issued MBP running High Sierra.

On my current, but low priority list, is trying to get SMB1 to work on the MBP. I don't know if it's the NAS that is stopping SMB1 connections, but I cannot connect using CIFS (which is SMB1). My limited Googling suggests that there is a way to get SMB1 turned back on. I just haven't gone down that rabbit hole yet.

Now…I am also connecting to the other Macs on my home network via AFP as well. Despite Apple deprecating AFP, I've come to discover that where it concerns SSDs, AFP seems to be the better protocol. I've had no issues. My G4 is sharing a 6TB drive to the home network via AFP and SMB and while I'm confident that I have connected to it in the past with the M2, I will verify that on Monday when the M2 turns itself on for work.

But yeah…not having any issues using AFP on a M2 MBP.

Oh! And the M2 is on Sonoma 14.1. Just to point that out.

Yes, you can connect to AFP on an M2 Mac, but you can't host AFP on an M2 Mac server.

I'm wondering if I have to go back to an Intel Mac Mini for my home server. I wanted the server to run fast on an SSD, and be low-power, low maintenance and very fast speeds. Is there any recommended Mac for that? The M2 Mini is great for blazing SSD speeds, but just can't deliver AFP...

 

[B S Magnet]

I'm wondering if I have to go back to an Intel Mac Mini for my home server. I wanted the server to run fast on an SSD, and be low-power, low maintenance and very fast speeds. Is there any recommended Mac for that? The M2 Mini is great for blazing SSD speeds, but just can't deliver AFP...

The late 2014 Mac mini can accommodate both a 2.5-inch internal SSD and an internal m.2 NVMe SSD blade, and it also has Thunderbolt 2 for external NAS boxes, as needed. If you want lowest-possible power and only plan to use it as a file server and for nothing else, you may be able to get away with the bargain-basement version with the 1.4GHz i5.

 

[Arctic Moose]

Uh, you know SMB is an IBM, and later Microsoft creation, correct?

I am aware of the origins, yes.

Microsoft publishes the specification, and there is an open source implementation that is widely accepted. (And even Apple used it for a while.)

Is this as good as an entirely free specification? Maybe not, but it is better than maintaining a second proprietary protocol that provides no real benefit, and that is far from as widely adopted.

You know, I know, and most of the folks who are participating on this thread or are regulars to this subforum, are cognizant how a super-majority share of file transfers completed on currently supported or “vintage” Mac models aren’t using ssh, sftp, scp, or even smb3 to move those files. They’re using AirDrop. They’re using their subscription iCloud drive. They’re using some other cloud service, where the file doesn’t go directly to the intended recipient, but to a corporate intermediary as a by-way (which, frankly, raises a whole other class of security topics for another discussion).

Perhaps, but I fail to see how this has anything to do with the removal of ftp. Usage of ftp should be discouraged, and if you wish to use it anyhow, it is easy to install.