Apple IIGS Netboot Authentication

[Rusty <rdekema@gmail.com>]

Greetings,

I am currently working on making a ROM 01 IIGS boot via the network,
and I am having a problem with authenticating to the AFP server once
the machine bootstraps from the network. I was wondering if anyone has
any insight into what might be the problem:

First of all, I'm using netatalk 2.0.3 + a2boot on a FreeBSD machine
to provide afp and a2boot services. When I boot the GS into System
6.0.1 from a local disk, I can authenticate to and mount shares from
the afp server with no problem. I have been using netatalk's "randnum"
authentication module (uams_randnum.so) for this.

Using this same configuration, when I set the IIGS to boot from the
network, it bootstraps fine and loads a program called something like
the Apple II Network Server Connector. This program scans the network
for AFP servers, and asks me to choose and log into one to continue
booting. When I select my afp server and log in using the correct
username and password, the program quickly gives a message saying: "A
system error has occurred. Contact your network administrator."

If I purposely enter my password incorrectly at this point, it says
that I have entered an invalid password. If I purposely enter an
incorrect username, it says that I have entered an invalid username or
that the account is disabled. So, it appears that authentication is,
in a sense, "working," but I don't know what the system error is that
it's complaining about.

I thought perhaps this afp client did not support randnum
authentication correctly, so I tried reconfiguring my afp server to
use plain text (cleartxt) authentication. Once I did this, I am not
able to authenticate from the GS netboot client at all. I get an error
saying I have entered an invalid password. I thought that perhaps the
uams_clrtxt module was not reading my passwd file correctly, but I was
able to authenticate to the server in clrtxt mode from my Mac OS X
machine, so that appears not to be the case.

Finally, I reconfigured the afp server once again, this time to use
guest authentication. However, when I select "Log On as Guest" on the
GS, I get the same error message as when I authenticated correctly in
randnum mode, which was "A system error has occurred. Contact your
network administrator."

I'm a bit mystified at this point; I don't exactly know what else to
try. I've read that I can recompile netatalk to make it give more
verbose logging information, so I guess I'll do that and see if I can
find out what the problem is, but before/while I do this, I was
wondering if anyone else has seen this problem or has any ideas about
what its cause might be.

Thanks,
Rusty