ACL support for AFP is implemented with NFSv4 ACLs. Few filesystems and fewer OSes support these. At the time of implementation its only provided with ZFS on Solaris, Opensolaris and derived distributions.
In order to be able to support ACLs, the following things have to be configured:
You MUST configure two ACL parameters for any volume you want to use with Netatalk:
aclinherit = passthrough aclmode = passthrough
For an explanation of what these parameters mean and how to apply them see, your hosts ZFS documentation (e.g. man zfs).
Your server and the clients must be part of a security association where identity data is coming from a common source. ACLs in Darwin are based on UUIDs and so is the ACL specification in AFP 3.2. Therefor your source of identity data has to provide an attribute for every user and group where a UUID is stored as a ASCII string.
In other words:
Finally you can add options:acls to your volume defintion to add ACL support. In case your volume basedir doesn't grant read permissions via mode (like: 0700 root:adm) but only via ACLs, you MUST add the nostat option to the volume defintion.
afp_ldap.conf(5), AppleVolumes.default(5)