Filed under: iPod Family, iPhone
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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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
ES Odin said 10:19AM on 11-11-2007
This should also work with any Linux based client that has access to apple protocol packages. In Ubuntu the package is "netatalk". It makes it real simple to manage the music library on the iPhone with Amarok or any other music manager that hadles the previous iPods.
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Martin Aumueller said 12:53PM on 12-11-2007
Did you manage to mount the AFP exports from you iPhone in Linux? If so, could you please post how or add that to http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Media_Device:IPod
Brian said 10:51AM on 11-11-2007
Wow, fantastic. I wonder how anybody could call the iPhone expensive when it has so much functionality. I can now ditch my thumb drive and back up to the iPhone.
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vatvat said 10:51AM on 11-11-2007
WOW, what about auto syncing with iTunes using AFP?
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ill-tempered said 11:03AM on 11-11-2007
Thank you.. have been waiting for this for a long time.. will wait until it is on installer and services is updated!
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Seraphim said 11:05AM on 11-11-2007
Wait, doesn't WinSCP already do this? or is this different than what I think it is?
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Rich said 11:08AM on 11-11-2007
Is there a program that allows for enabling/disabling of wifi from the main menu screen? If not, I hope someone will write one as it is a pain (a small pain I grant) to have to delve into settings each time to turn wifi on and off.
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Seraphim said 11:11AM on 11-11-2007
Rich, there is an app on installer.app called services. It can turn on/off Edge, Wifi and SSH.
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tristan Dunn said 11:16AM on 11-11-2007
How do i run the .sh file from within an sftp app. Every time I try to, it just downloads the file and i have been trying to do the tar thing but am a little confused. Can anyone help
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A2 said 11:32AM on 11-11-2007
@6: the answer is the app named Services. New question: does anyone know how to reach Chris Hoffman, the author of Services? I desperately want to ask that he add toggles for this, AFP, and Firefly music server to his Services app, along with a phone toggle!!!
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spliffalicious said 11:43AM on 11-11-2007
maybe I'm too literal.
haven't had much success.
any sueggestions?
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starkruzr said 11:44AM on 11-11-2007
"To add new applications, just drop them into the Applications folder."
Don't you have to do some plist hackery for this to work?
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spliffalicious said 11:47AM on 11-11-2007
wait, wait...
"alpine"...
thats not "dottie"
-this a firmware specific thing?
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spliffalicious said 11:49AM on 11-11-2007
not sure how I failed at this...
its in my iphone... don't seem to know how to launch it...
just sits there, taunting me-
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vsc said 11:54AM on 11-11-2007
Use this to start afpd as a service,
Disabled
Label
com.core.afp
OnDemand
ProgramArguments
/opt/iphone/afp/afpd
-d
-D
-Uuams_dhx.so
StandardErrorPath
/dev/null
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macFabri said 11:55AM on 11-11-2007
Great ! Works nice and im seeing here WiFi Sync near around ?
** You guys should run terminal commands inside iPhone/iTouch.. Make sure you have BSD System installed and install Term-vt100 ( Terminal ) all from Installer.app
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Oscar Eg Gensmann said 11:56AM on 11-11-2007
Works like a charm on my iTouch. Props'n'Street creds to the dev.
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vsc said 11:57AM on 11-11-2007
Ok that didn't work....
Use this,
http://pastebin.com/m17896445
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SireB said 12:08PM on 11-11-2007
@tristan Dunn
Read: http://www.computerhope.com/unix/utar.htm#03
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drh said 12:30PM on 11-11-2007
Couldn't get it to work either.
I wish people would do more testing of this stuff before they start trying to promote it.
I have the service running on the iphone abd I can connect to it using the instructions afp://{ip address} but it just offers a 'test volume' as a folder to mount. When you do this you end up with this volume mounted with no contents!!!!!!!!!!!
I appreciate the efforts gone into this but WTF.
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