Cannot Access Afp Volume Via Finter

[johnrshearer]

I am having a problem with mounting a volume from an AppleTalk server. The server is Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 "Sarge" running netatalk 2.0.2-3; the client is Mac OS X 10.3.9 "Panther". Both the client and server are fully updated. The AppleTalk server is named "The Shearers" and the volume is question is called "Quicken".

In the Finder under "Network" an icon appears for my SMB servers and for my AppleTalk server. When I double-click the AppleTalk server I get the error...

The Alias "The Shearers" could not be opened,
because the original item cannot be found.

After searching the web extensively this error seems a little more common for SMB servers but not for AppleTalk servers. The most useful reference I found to this error describes it as meaning that the requested volume is already mounted, but this is not the case.

I was able to mount the desired volume from the command line as root using the following...

# mkdir /Volumes/Quicken
# mount_afp -o rw,nodev,nosuid afp:/at/John:xxxxxx@The\ Shearers/Quicken /Volumes/Quicken

This does not work as my default non-root user, that user cannot view the contents of the mount if root mounts it, and once mounted I cannot change the ownership or permissions of the mount point.

Another Mac on the network, also Mac OS X 10.3.9 but not as recently updated, has no trouble accessing the server. This fact, along with root's ability to mount the share, indicates that this is not a server problem or a protocol issue but some sort of Mac OS X user interface problem.

Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks! - John R. S.