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AFP for iPhone and iPod touch

Insanely awesome iPhone hacker and developer "Core" just finished implementing AFP for the iPhone and iPod touch. This software connects your iPhone (or touch) to your computer using AFP, the AppleTalk Filing Protocol. Your iPhone shows up on your desktop as a disk with full read/write access.

The AFP server is brand new, so it is not yet available in Installer.app. To install by hand, use sftp to copy the tar file into /opt/iphone. Extract the archive on your iPhone or touch--the tar archive program is part of the BSD program; use tar xvf name-of-archive.tar--and run /opt/iphone/afp/startserver.sh &. The ampersand lets the program run in the background. (You will need to restart it after reboots.)

Once installed and running, go to Finder. Choose Go > Connect To Server, and enter the afp address for your iPhone, in my case afp://192.168.0.111. Just use the afp:// prefix with the local IP address of your iPhone. Enter your user id (root) and password (alpine) and your iPhone or iPod appears in the sources list for your Finder windows.

Once your iPhone learns how to add itself as a disk, you'll start wondering how you ever lived without this. To add new applications, just drop them into the Applications folder. To back-up your personal data, just copy /var/root/Library. This is just an awesome accomplishment. Thank you Core!

Hopefully soon, we'll see not only an Installer.app version but one with a controllable launch daemon that will let you enable and disable the service as desired.

Update: If you're installing by hand, make sure you use the version for Registered Users. It's the one from November 10th. Don't use the earlier one that only allows guest mode.



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iPod Family iPhone

Insanely awesome iPhone hacker and developer "Core" just finished implementing AFP for the iPhone and iPod touch. This software connects...
 

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smitty

I dont know how to get in touch with the new developer for this, but i had a problem logging in with this at first. Turns out if you change your shell in /etc/master.password it wont work. Weird. keep it /bin/sh.


December 18 2007 at 10:55 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Benjamin Harley

Same problem. My phone became unstable after installing AFPd. I don't know if it has to do with the files it creates in the root and home directories, the .DS_files or something about the afp daemon itself. I've had to restore my phone for the first time (every other application i have installed has not compromised my phone) - and it is a bit painful setting everything up again (i guess i'll have to backup my hacks from now on). In any case, a warning for potential users, and since I don't know how to get feedback to the developer, I hope this will get back to CORE.

Thanks so much for working on this, however. It will be create if it can clean up after itself, or whatever is needed to play nicely with the phone.

December 01 2007 at 10:29 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
tedjohns

It just became available with the App Installer, Installed it and everything works Great !! Thanks Ted

November 28 2007 at 1:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
lavillageboy

I am a noob and am completely lost. I downloaded the tar file and using ishare got it on to my itouch. then i downloaded the term 100 from installer but now i am not sure what to do. and i'm not even sure that i got the right app downloaded because it is an .exe file extension, i am using a mac, so shouldn't it be a dng extension? any help would be great

November 23 2007 at 3:55 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
jikespingleton

There needs to be a cleanup script built into this. The :2eDS_Store files and the .AppleDouble files that AppleTalk puts in for finder views screws up the iPhone and causes constant crashing. Ever since I installed AFP and have been using it instead of SSH I have had constant crashing on the phone. i was getting .AppleDouble and :2eDS_Store files showing up everywhere (listed as summerboard themes, ROMS, and apps in Customize) OS X puts these files in every folder you browse to over appletalk. There is a ton of scripts out there to clean up these files after every session. I think that they need to be built right into the AFP package so that the cleanup happens automatically. Otherwise people are going to have buggy, crashing iPhones.

a simple cleanup script can be found here:
http://www.imhorst.net/?p=31

Erica, I know you're in contact with the iPhone dev community, us users would be very appreciative if you could relay this message to the appropriate channels to rid our iPhone fs of these files/folders.

Thanks,
~ Jike

November 20 2007 at 11:28 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
poetic_folly

Easy guide here: http://modmyifone.com/wiki/index.php/AFP_iPhone_from_Finder

Thanks, Erica.

November 18 2007 at 2:24 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris

how do I change the name that shows up in my side bar... it currently says "localhost" and I want to change that.

Also, How can I change the password for the AFP service? I changed it on SSH but thats I all know how to.

November 18 2007 at 1:23 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Rollin

It's all working and the plist file did it for me. My question is, when this mounts, it shows the phone in Leopard Finder under Shared as "localhost", not as the phone's hostname or by the DNS name I gave the afp:// command to get in there. If I give the command "hostname" at the command prompt in the phone, I get the right answer. Nothing in the plist file appears to make any reference to a hostname. Where is Finder grabbing this from? I tend to think it's something in the service.

November 18 2007 at 12:41 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Scott

although i'm late on this, this is super-useful . . . and it just works!

November 17 2007 at 4:09 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Shai

this is avaialable on installer via my source http://ride4.org/shai.xml

November 15 2007 at 12:40 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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