> Or it could be that TM relies on some very rarely used feature in AFP which is not or at least not perfectly implemented in netatalk. There was a Time Capsul

> Or it could be that TM relies on some very rarely used feature in AFP which is not or at least not perfectly implemented in netatalk. There was a Time Capsule firmware + OS X update duo that fixed reliability issues somewhere in the Snow Leopard timeline. IIRC it added a bunch of "damage control/prevention" methods to AFP and HFS+ (backups being stored in a remotely accessed sparsebundle), aiming to bulletproof against flaky network situations and interruptions like sleep. Hopefully OS X appears to degrade nicely in absence of those features, although you might not get all the safety net features. I built an Debian armel netatalk package myself for fun about one year ago. It took "quite a while" to compile on my NSLU2, but AFP shares ended up working like a charm.