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NAS Wonkiness

PostPosted: Tue May 15, 2018 8:31 pm
by DaveL17
This isn't Indigo-related per se, and definitely not in my case, but it could potentially be for others, so I thought I'd share.

I keep my music and my iTunes library on a Drobo NAS and have been having huge issues with iTunes. It flat would not load. Froze every time. Hasn't been stable since upgrading to Sierra. I downgraded iTunes, recreated the library, etc.--pretty much everything short of downgrading the OS--and nothing seemed to work. Then I stumbled on what *seems* to be a "solution".

I use the Drobo Dashboard and it mounts the Drobo on my Macs at boot with a friendly name (using afp://). I came across a post (somewhere) that suggested that mounting the Drobo using Samba (smb://) would work better. CMD-K (or Go->Connect to Server) and mount the Drobo manually using Samba (smb://10.0.1.123). Started iTunes, pointed it at the new mount point and iTunes started virtually instantly.

I suspect this is more about the protocol than the brand of device so, more generally: if you're having gremlins with a NAS device (or applications trying to access a NAS device), try mounting it with Samba. You might get lucky.

Re: NAS Wonkiness

PostPosted: Tue May 15, 2018 8:39 pm
by matt (support)
Similar experience here – I have a QNAP NAS that also works much better when mounting share points using Samba than AFP.

Re: NAS Wonkiness

PostPosted: Tue May 15, 2018 8:49 pm
by DaveL17
Thanks Jay - misery loves company. :D

Re: NAS Wonkiness

PostPosted: Wed May 16, 2018 12:29 am
by autolog
DaveL17 wrote:
Thanks Jay - misery loves company. :D

Jay :?: :D

Re: NAS Wonkiness

PostPosted: Wed May 16, 2018 3:44 am
by DaveL17
Dammit.

matt. Matt. MATT.

Re: NAS Wonkiness

PostPosted: Wed May 16, 2018 8:02 am
by durosity
You do realise that Jay is actually just a figment of Matts imagination? And I should know. I own half of his house.


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Re: NAS Wonkiness

PostPosted: Wed May 16, 2018 8:23 am
by DaveL17
I long suspected that they were in fact one person with a multiple personality, but then realized that didn't make sense because--if that were true--they'd be a lot more people.

Re: NAS Wonkiness

PostPosted: Wed May 16, 2018 10:17 am
by jay (support)
DaveL17 wrote:
I long suspected that they were in fact one person with a multiple personality, but then realized that didn't make sense because--if that were true--they'd be a lot more people.


Who do you think durosity is?

Re: NAS Wonkiness

PostPosted: Wed May 16, 2018 10:36 am
by DaveL17
jay (support) wrote:
DaveL17 wrote:
I long suspected that they were in fact one person with a multiple personality, but then realized that didn't make sense because--if that were true--they'd be a lot more people.


Who do you think durosity is?

Too........many..........jokes.



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Re: NAS Wonkiness

PostPosted: Wed May 16, 2018 3:01 pm
by durosity
This could explain MANY things.

.. I think this entitles me to 1/3 ownership of the company jet.


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Re: NAS Wonkiness

PostPosted: Wed Nov 28, 2018 7:17 am
by DaveL17
A little bit more fuel for the fire with respect to AFP vs. Samba.

After upgrading to Mojave, my preferred approach to managing my iTunes library (media and library files on a NAS mounted with SMB) became completely unusable. I preferred to run it this way so that I could work on the library from multiple Macs. However, when trying to sync music to a new iPhone, it took 14 hours to transfer the first 1,000 songs. I worked with Apple to try to figure it out, but never got to a satisfactory solution. I bit the bullet and moved all the media and library files to an iMac and will only use that machine from now on. After doing that, I was able to sync 2,000+ songs in about 10 minutes. I have also noticed that some programs like Preview and Pages would also choke when trying to write to the NAS over SMB. As I noted above, this AFP vs. SMB wonkiness has been happening since upgrading to Sierra.

Anyway, I recently set up a new Samba server on a Raspberry Pi, and I noticed something interesting while I was doing some testing. I have a plain text file residing on the Pi that I was editing with TextEdit. When I went to save changes, I happened to be watching File Manager and noticed that the Mac tried to write a new folder to the server during the save process. Then I got an error message back--something to the effect of "This device doesn't support version control". I don't have this problem when saving with other programs like BBEdit, so Apple versioning--or at least the version of SMB that Apple uses--seems a likely candidate for the instability.

There may be a solution, and I need to do some more research as I'm not at all familiar with the architecture of SMB. But it sounds like it may be possible to force which SMB version the OS uses. Since it seems that SMB is the wave of the future for Apple, I'd really like to figure this out. May be a wild goose chase, but If I learn anything else useful, I'll report back.

Re: NAS Wonkiness

PostPosted: Wed Nov 28, 2018 7:46 am
by mat
Dave,

Please do report back. I've not yet upgraded all the macs in the house (except the indigo server), and have two drobo (main and back up) with our photographs etc on. I've not turned them on since upgrading the home network a few weeks back, but will also have a play when I get a few hours.

Regards


Mat

Re: NAS Wonkiness

PostPosted: Wed Nov 28, 2018 7:54 am
by DaveL17
Thanks Mat — will do.


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Re: NAS Wonkiness

PostPosted: Sun Dec 02, 2018 2:08 pm
by DaveL17
This setup seems to be working well.

Reformatted my Drobo USB as a single HFS+ partition.
Connected the Drobo to a Raspberry Pi Model B Rev. 2 running Samba
chmod the share to 777 (the SMB share requires username/password)

I can edit files from an ssh session and from a SMB mount on a Mac. When saving, OS X does try to set up versioning--which doesn't work--but it no longer throws an error.