This is really noticable when you want to use your server to handle the time machine backups.  To get things working before I use the instructions here (http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/) to get things working.  This worked great, and even better when you remember to read everything and actually compile the netatalk yourself, instead of using the prepackaged one.  Why? because you do want the cracklib/ssl support, so you can use encrypted passwords.  Ubuntu/Debian won’t include that.

Rebuilding this time, I had two extra problems, and it looks like now they have a note on that page mentioning the first.  I couldnt’ ever get a connection to work after the upgrade, with no useful information in the logs.  Just that my session started, and ended.  It turns out in each share there was a .AppleDB directory, that had to be wiped, and rebuilt (by simply restarting the service) before they would accept connections.

The second problem I had was that even though I’d installed cracklib2, in jaunty the deps hadn’t included the PAM module for it. So I could build against cracklib, but couldn’t have it talk to pam.  One quick apt-get and I was running again.