I've been trying to find a way to share files seamlessly between Yosemite and a Quadra 800 running 8.1. In a perfect world, I'd enable file sharing on Yosemite and it would just work.
When the server is Snow Leopard (or better), the Quadra complains that the server is incompatible, which I take to mean "too new".
When the server is Leopard, the Quadra offers me only guest access, which already seems wrong, and then crashes trying to mount the only volume on offer. It's a fresh installation of Leopard, so I'm prrrrrretty sure I have not yet had the opportunity to screw up the configuration. In any case the crash doesn't seem like it could possibly be my fault.
When the server is netatalk atop Ubuntu within VirtualBox atop Yosemite, things seem to work acceptably. I like the fact that I've eliminated a machine but don't like the fact that I've added a virtual machine and have to indirect through an additional file system. I apparently don't dislike it enough to install netatalk directly on Yosemite.
I considered putting netatalk in a VPS but then realized AFP traffic, including passwords, is in the clear. Is an AppleShare client this old even capable of better? (The letters UAM are bouncing around in the back of my head.) If it can't do better, then I guess I could consider struggling with configuring a VPS which does site-to-site IPSec and run netatalk within a VLAN. Because that's easy to figure out. Not.
None of these solutions is quite as seamless as I would like, but of course the fact that I am able to get anything working at all already seems like a miracle. (You should have seen me cackle when I got the Quadra onto WiFi.)
Any ideas for improvement?