Apple wants to kill your Time Capsule, but they run NetBSD so they can't:
It seems like Apple is finally going to remove support for AFP from macOS, twelve years after first moving from AFP to SMB for its default network file-sharing technology. This change shouldn't impact most people, as it's highly unlikely you're using AFP for anything in 2026. Still, there is one small group of people to whom this change has an actual impact: owners of Apple's Time Capsule devices. Time Capsules only support AFP and SMB1, and with SMB1 being removed from macOS ages ago, and now AFP being on the chopping block as well, macOS 27 would render your Time Capsule more or less unusable.
It's important to note that the last Time Capsule sold by Apple, the fifth generation, was released in 2013, and the product line as a whole was discontinued in 2018. If you bought a Time Capsule in the twilight years of the line's availability, I think you have a genuine reason to be perturbed by Apple cutting you off from your product if you upgrade to macOS 27, but at least you have the option of keeping an older version of macOS around so you can keep interacting with your time Capsule. It still feels like a bit of a shitty move though, as those fifth generation models came with up to 3TB of storage, which can still serve as a solid NAS solution.
Thank your lucky stars, then, that open source can, as usual, come to the rescue when proprietary software vendors do what they always do and screw over their customers. Did you know every generation of Time Capsule actually runs NetBSD, and that it's trivially easy to add support for Samba 4 and SMB3 authentication to your Time Capsule, thereby extending its life expectancy considerably? TimeCapsuleSMB does exactly that.
If the setup completes successfully, your Time Capsule will run its own Samba 4 server, advertise itself over Bonjour (show up automatically in the "Network" folder on macOS), and accept authenticated SMB3 connections from macOS. You should then be able to open Finder, choose Connect to Server, and use a normal SMB URL instead of relying on Apple's legacy stack. You should also be able to use the disk for Time Machine backups.
↫ TimeCapsuleSMBIt's compatible with both NetBSD 4 and NetBSD 6-based Time Capsules, although you'll need to run a single SMB activation command every time a NetBSD 4-based Time Capsule reboots. This will also disable any AFP and SMB1 support, but that is kind of moot since those are exactly the technologies that don't and won't work anymore once macOS 27 is released. The installation is also entirely reversible if, for whatever reason, you want to undo the addition of Samba 4.
This whole saga is such an excellent example of why open source software protects users' rights, by design.
(Score: -1, Informative) by RS3 on Saturday May 02, @04:30PM (2 children)
I've been using AIs to help me dig and refine web search results. I've found that AI's answers greatly depend on how you phrase your question, and often you have to be more and more specific, tell the AI you're technically expert, etc., to get the really good stuff. In fact, in this case, the AI seemed to toe the Apple corporate line with most of the answers until I dug even deeper.
BTW, to me, "firmware" is any software that's programmed into some kind of non-volatile memory. It could be NVRAM, EEPROM, FLASH, PROM, EPROM, etc. But it seems the term "firmware" has been corrupted to mean a very specific section of non-volatile memory. Point is, from what I gather, there is some lower level of boot code that decides if it likes what it sees in the firmware. That was part of the problem with getting the AI to tell me if the Time Capsule could be repurposed.
As in the general "right to repair" movement (that I'm 100% in favor of), clever people have figured out how to unlock the Time Capsule and run an OS that is much more useful, configurable, upgradeable, etc. I had to ask in many differing ways to get the AI to admit that in fact there is a way (long, sorry):
If you "brick" it, in spite of popular misconception you generally can recover, but it might require a bit of hardware hacking, connecting to a programming port on the CPU, maybe even cutting some traces (circuit board printed wires) to enable the programming, etc.
I also like the worst-case scenario of replacing the circuit with a Raspberry Pi or Arduino or whatever.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Sunday May 03, @02:46PM (1 child)
I had a hardware TC and the problem with hacking it is I had non-technical relatives relying on it until it broke. Then I replaced it with a couple clicks to enable TC protocol on FreeNAS, which works great. So my window of having unused TC hardware that works was zero.
By the time I should have retired my TC hardware it would have been a better experience and higher performance and more fun to stick a 2TB USB flash stick in a rasPi. Prices of course have exploded since then but mini PCs are still cheap-ish etc.
Back in the day when it was new, TC hardware was surprisingly cheap for 2TB of spinning rust I think Apple was subsidizing the product to sell more macs. Of course in the 2020s its not that great of hardware.
IIRC when I tore it apart it was the usual switching power supply designed to die after awhile. Electrolytic caps next to smokin hot heatsinks or something like that IIRC.
I did not enjoy tearing it apart it was overly integrated engineering like all the "joy" of taking apart a phone. Not a fun hardware platform to hack on. And it was not overly inspirational hardware, kind of boring choices for CPU etc IIRC.
Performance of a large RAID array FreeNAS server implementing TC protocol is much faster than old TC hardware, in retrospect I wish I had replaced the hardware a long time ago.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04, @12:33AM
Phenomenal post, as always, thank you. I was thinking more along the lines of the pseudo coolness of gutting a thing, anything really, to make it work far better but still look original. In cars, "resto-mod". I've seen where someone takes one of those big aluminum Macintosh computers, or any Mac, and squeezes in a much hotter MB, PSU, etc. Or even a Commodore 64 with some super fast but tiny guts. "Hotrod" is another term. Bit of a hotrodder I am.
10 or so years ago a good friend had a 1U rack mount LaCie NAS that died. Pretty thing. LaCie being Mac world stuff. He, and moreso his artist fiancee wanted it fixed. Well, IIRC restoring it stock was impossible (I don't remember why) so I installed Alpine Linux. It installed so quickly, self discovered the drives, created a software RAID, and he's still using it.
IIRC the original boot drive died and we couldn't get restore media for whatever LaCie had done, so I tried Alpine and that was that.
I'm 100% with you on hardware. The capacitor plague continues. A couple of weeks ago I had an almost new LED bulb stink up my bedroom. Smelled like a big pile of smoldering wet newspaper. I feared I had a fire, but it was just a cap. Said bulb had been sitting unused for a few years, so I conclude the bad caps deteriorate whether used or not.
While on the topic, I think you're an EE, maybe not as into audio as I am. I repaired several very expensive microphones recently. Tantalum caps that went bad. Rule of thumb- do not run them more than 1/2 rated WV. Better yet, toss them. I replaced them with some multi-layer ceramics, like 4.7uF 100V. Those mics never sounded so good. Genius engineer at work said that tantalums have relatively high ESR even when new, which explains why the various mics sound better now than when new.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Saturday May 02, @05:20PM (4 children)
I don't think they want to kill it, they just don't want to support hardware that went out of fashion (that is probably an important metric for Apple) about a decade ago. Just like with a lot of modern hardware, there are few that offer any kind of lifetime updates. It's not that I want to defend Apple or anything, after all I doubt I can get updates for my Apple machines. But they do have manuals for them -- when manuals were actual manuals and not just plug in blue cable in blue port.
Seems someone fixed it or stepped up when Apple stepped down. Problem solved? In some regard perhaps other companies should look at it to, for how long are you going to offer support for your hardware? How long should backwards compatibility last? After all certain operating systems seem to offer combatibility back so far that they keep getting slow and crappier from it. Perhaps once in a while there might be a time to purge the code tree of old crud. For those that still have them or use them there are usually other options or well they probably just don't update software that frequently.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday May 02, @05:42PM (1 child)
Yes, this doesn't so much sound like them wanting to kill as much as it is that the device are built using old protocols that in the case of SMB1 is a massive security issue. I'm less familiar with AFP as nobody seems to be using it for any recent hardware and most of the time you have the option of running it along side other file sharing options.
I'd also be curious how many of those time capsules are even still in operation. The most recent one is like 13 years old at this point and isn't going to support any of the updated features that modern hardware would be expected to handle. I'm sure they probably work OK, but how many of them are still secure after all that time?
Personally, this feels like a feature that's better provided by a Raspbery Pi, although there's a bunch of other hardware that can do this quite a bit better now.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday May 03, @02:50PM
Having used one the featureset was definitely internal use only not something you'd expose to the internet or even the general public.
It's basically a very standardized and limited NAS. IIRC it has a single shared password for all users. Most of the magic is in the client side software WRT making and restoring backups and sharing disk space cooperatively when new machines are added.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 02, @07:16PM
It should be for as long as they want to keep their copyrights and patents on the product.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Sunday May 03, @01:59AM
[Zoolander]: What? Pfft. Apple never goes out of fashion you polygoon.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday May 03, @02:35PM (1 child)
Another replacement alternative for time capsule which I've used is its just a couple clicks on a FreeNAS install to make it act like a time capsule, which works perfectly.
Of course FreeNAS has been renamed to TrueNAS which is shutting down in favor of TrueEdgeNAS or whatever... Ugh
A question as a guy who knows mac users but "isn't really a mac guy" I'm aware of doing sysadmin type stuff such as making backups and restoring from backups using a Time Capsule (real HW or emulated). So if Apple doesn't make or support Time Capsules anymore, how does one "do backups" and "do individual file restores" in the modern mac era? Its one of those questions that too basic or requires knowing so many trademarked names I don't even know what to google for. So if you used Time Capsules in the 10s and into the 20s, now that its getting wiped out you'd replace that with ... what exactly?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Sunday May 03, @04:36PM
If you do it yourself and is not part of some work network you mostly just get an/any external SSD with a USB or Thunderbolt connection (format with the right filesystem -- apfs or hfs+) and set that up with Time Machine or sync it to your iCloud. Done. At least that is what we used where I used to work so it's based on most of the Mac people there. Even with the network backups from the system most of them liked to have that spare external drive that they brought with them or home etc.