atalkd - Man Page

userland AppleTalk network manager daemon

Synopsis

atalkd [-f configfile] [-P pidfile] [-1] [-2] [-d] [-t] [-v]

atalkd is responsible for all user level AppleTalk network management. This includes routing, name registration and lookup, zone lookup, and the AppleTalk Echo Protocol (similar to ping(8)). Specifically, this corresponds to the RTMP, NBP, ZIP, and AEP protocols in the AppleTalk protocol family.

The init system of your OS will typically start the atalkd daemon at bootup. The daemon first reads from its configuration file, atalkd.conf. If there is no configuration file, or if no interfaces have been defined, atalkd will attempt to configure all available interfaces and will create a configuration file. See atalkd.conf(5) for details on the configuration file format.

Options

-1: Forces AppleTalk Phase 1.
-2: Forces AppleTalk Phase 2.
-d: Write some additional debugging information to stdout.
-f configfile: Consult configfile instead of atalkd.conf for the configuration information.
-P pidfile: Specifies the file in which atalkd stores its process id.
-t: Turns on transition routing.
-v: Print version information and exit.

Routing

If you are connecting an atalkd router to an existing AppleTalk network, you should first contact your local network administrators to obtain appropriate network addresses.

atalkd can provide routing between interfaces by configuring multiple interfaces. Each interface must be assigned a unique net-range between 1 and 65279 (0 and 65535 are illegal, and addresses between 65280 and 65534 are reserved for startup). It is best to choose the smallest useful net-range, i.e. if you have three machines on a LAN, choose a net-range below 1000. Each net-range may have an arbitrary list of zones associated with it.

Note that atalkd automatically acts as a router if there is more than one interface, and no other configurations are present.