This guide is a how-to on setting up AppleShare IP (Hereafter: “ASIP”) 6 to provide local and internet services.

This guide refers very heavily to decisions made and conventions used by vtools, but several of the presumptions I use here may not be suitable for your scenario.

AppleShare IP is Apple's LAN and Internet server software during the late 1990s. It succeeds plain AppleShare, which was exclusively LAN software.

The primary functionality you can get from AppleShare IP is:

• File (AppleShare, SMB/CIFS, FTP)
• Print
• Web
• Email

On top of this, you can think of AppleShare IP as having directory and identity services.

There are a few other utilities, but they aren't likely

A big question here is why you would do this?

If you've gotten this far, you understand that ASIP is network server software with a few different core functions, and that it's focused primarily on services for old Macs, but there is some era-appropriate cross-platform functionality.

You are probably aware of projects such as A2Server and techniques such as loading Netatalk2 on a Linux system.

So, why would you do this instead of that?

In short, the best reason to use ASIP is either because you have an abundance of vintage Mac hardware or because you want to achieve a specific aesthetic, and have an authentic 1998 file server experience.

Classic Mac OS is not secure and running a system like this on the Public Internet can create any number of problems for you, the data on the server, your home network, or the greater Internet community.

AppleShare IP supports no encryption whatsoever. The one place it barely supports something, the encryption is so weak it may as well not exist.

So, you should consider anything you put on AppleShare *will* be transmitted in plain-text across the network.

In addition, if you enable the email functionality: AppleShare IP has no functionality whatsoever to require or enforce authentication of any kind at all for sending email. So, if you open an AppleShare machine as an SMTP server it *will* be used as an open relay for sending spam.

If you have gone to the trouble of setting up reverse DNS and opening up port 25 on your network, what this will mean is that your IP and hostname will be blacklisted as enabling spam or other unwanted email.

You should not put an AppleShare IP email server on the Internet, at all.

All of that said: AppleShare IP 6.3.3 closes all of the known vulnerabilities for AppleShare. However, in addition to generally most of why no other vulnerabilities are known is because nobody has been looking for twenty years.

If a new vulnerability is found and exploited, it will never be patched.

AppleShare IP 6.3.3, the terminating version, requires Mac OS 9.1, and will, as such, run on almost any extant PowerPC Mac.

The datasheet says it requires 80 megabytes of RAM and works on 601, 604, 604e/ev and G3/G4 processors. I don't see why it wouldn't run on something with a 603 in it, but most Macs with 603s in them weren't built particularly well for being file servers. (Some of them also do not support enough RAM.)

AppleShare IP 6.3.3 Datasheet

The datasheet also says you need 250 megabytes of disk space to install the software. I wouldn't recommend running a server on anything less than 1-gigabyte disk.

Mac OS 9 supports 2TB volumes, and PCI PowerMacs can use SIL3112 SATA cards. The most ideal configuration would be a small disk or partition for boot (you could put mail on this volume as well, if you were running it) and then larger volumes for other data. More discussion about how to organize data is below in the disk layout and the file server and shares sections.

If you are running AppleShare on a NuBus PowerMac, you can use a SCSI disk replacer such as the SCSI2SD v6 (specifically the v6 because it wins all speed contests among the SCSI disk replacers) to make large volumes. The v6 and Mac OS 9.1 currently support basically as much SD card as you can buy.

The first account you create on the machine, using either Mac OS's setup wizard, or ASIP's own setup wizard, is the owner account. This is the all-seeing administrator of the account, and it is the user you are operating as when you sit at the server.

When this account connects to the server with FTP and AppleShare, it sees the disks in the machine, not the user-facing share points.

I recommend using a non-person name for this account. You could call it “servername-admin” or “srvadm” or “admin” or “serverowner” or something similar. If you were sure nobody else was going to assist in administration, you could call it [initials]-admin or something, to indicate it's your admin account.

It is possible for this account to have email services, but I don't, strictly speaking, recommend it.

This is more important if you put the machine on the Internet and similarly relatively important if you share the machine with other people.

By default, AppleShare IP places all service data on the boot hard disk. If you use the QS'02 Edu Server restore CD, the default disk name will be “Server HD” but you can rename this to whatever you prefer.