Major issue with AFP support and Time Machine

[nsne]

After enabling Time Machine support, I'm having serious problems with AFP shares. It seems as if the NAS doesn't know which AFP share to point to, the Time Machine sharepoint or the standard AFP.

In my Finder sidebar, I have two shares: "ReadyNAS" (this, I discovered, belongs to Time Machine) and "ReadyNAS (AFP)". When I'm mounting a share (usually "Media") using the afp:// address, sometimes the Finder will hide the share — meaning that it is invisible to the desktop and in the Network area of the Finder, but some applications (like iTunes) can still access it.

If I try to make it visible by mounting using another method, like clicking on "ReadyNAS (AFP)" in the sidebar, then occasionally the share will mount successfully. However, it results in what you might call a double mount — that is, a hidden "Media" share and a visible share that is actually "Media-1". Or vice versa.

Sometimes the mount appears to fall under "ReadyNAS" (as in, there will be a little "eject" icon next to it in the Finder) and other times it appears to fall under "ReadyNAS (AFP)". See the attached image. If I'm not mistaken, that Media share shouldn't be associated with the Time Machine "ReadyNAS" sharepoint.



I've tried creating symlinks, mounting using the local IP address (i.e., afp://192.168.1.xx/Media), or the long form (e.g., "afp://ReadyNAS (AFP)._afpovertcp._tcp.local/Media"), but I never know which mount I'm going to get. It's Russian roulette. Sometimes the share mounts fine, other times it mounts as hidden share and results in doubling. What's really irritating is that it screws up iTunes and I'm unable to download podcasts and apps because of the confusion that stems from duplicate hidden/visible AFP shares.

The only way to avoid the problem is to disable Time Machine.

[sphardy]

You appear to have "confused" your mac by the many different ways you have been trying to access your NAS - usually a symptom of something being screwed up in the KeyChain - and so the solution is to completely restart

The following typically enables this:

Disable AFP & TM on the NAS to prevent any further accesses
Remove any Symlinks / Aliases from your Mac related to NAS access
Remove *all* entries related to your NAS and its IP address from your Keychain
Reboot your Mac to ensure it is completely disconnected from the NAS and the updated Keychain is in effect
Re-enable AFP on your NAS
Connect to the NAS via the "NAS (AFP)" link in the finder sidebar ONLY - do not use cmd+k - and ensure you log in and can access shares
- Use the Connect as button in the upper right of finder to connect as a specific user rather than guest
Once you can access shares via the "NAS (AFP)" link, then re-enable TM on the NAS and setup access via System Preferences > TM

AFP access should then be automatic each time you click on the "NAS (AFP)" side bar entry
The "NAS" entry, which shows that the NAS TM service is available should never be used for access - it is purely a consequence of how the NAS advertises the TM service.

cmd+k connections should then also work correctly

[nsne]

I've run through every one of those steps three times now, but I'm still being plagued by "Media" and "Media-1" problems.

This is the Finder immediately after the latest attempt (with TM still turned off):



As you can see, even though I'm connected as admin directly through the "ReadyNAS (AFP)" menu selection, there's no eject button. Which means that the connection to the AFP share is taking place by some alternate route. I've removed all symlinks, cleared "Recent Servers" and everything in the cmd-K window, run Onyx, rebooted both devices after disabling the services, etc.

Is there some deep-level way that I can flush the Volume cache on the Mac? What about the NAS?

[EDIT: After a few more seconds of tinkering, I think it has to do with the "Advertise AFP over Bonjour" option. When I enable AFP but disable the Bonjour feature and then connect directly using cmd-K, I seem to be having more consistent luck with always getting the "Media" and not "Media-1".

[sphardy]

To get a media and media-1 volume means you have been connecting to the share twice as 2 different users. Please post the output of the "mount" command from terminal so we can see exactly what is mounted and how.

Do you or have you used multiple logins on your Mac? What happens after you have deleted all keychain entries etc and then re-enable AFP on the NAS? You should connect automatically as guest - does that happen?

Note that this must be a Mac issue - not a NAS issue. Only the Mac can initiate a connection and so somewhere you have some connection configured. There is nothing to be done on the NAS as it cannot trigger a connection

[nsne]

I've run through the steps again — although this time I disabled Bonjour broadcasting — and this is what I get:



Note that "ReadyNAS (AFP)" is not to be found in the sidebar, as expected, but the Mac is connecting to "Media" via the TM share somehow. The network address of the mounted share is afp://192.168.1.xx/Media.

This is after deleting all keychain entries, flushing all caches, etc.

When I enable hidden files, I can see "Media" mounted as a ghost volume on the desktop. Its local address is the same as above (i.e., afp://192.168.1.xx/Media). It also mounts with a ghost "homes" volume; I don't know if this is normal or not.



I honestly have no idea what's going on, and I'm not Terminal savvy enough to run through these steps using the command line.

The "confusion" seems to be somehow linked to iTunes, which is accessing my media library on the NAS volume. iTunes is the app that routinely mounts the "hidden" Media share.

I should add that I never experienced these problems on my NV+. It was only when I upgraded to an Ultra and enabled Time Machine.

[nsne]

I've been doing some more Googling re: the issue and ran the following command: ls -alOe /Volumes

This is the result:

total 8
drwxrwxrwt@ 4 root admin hidden 136 May 15 09:11 .
0: group:everyone deny add_file,add_subdirectory,directory_inherit,only_inherit
drwxrwxr-x@ 33 root admin - 1190 May 15 08:34 ..
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root admin - 1 May 15 08:31 Macintosh HD -> /
drwxrwxrwx 13 root wheel - 398 May 15 09:11 Media

... so the hidden "Media" share is mounting with "wheel" privileges. What does this mean?

Also found other ReadyNAS users who were having similar problems. This is the output of the "mount" command:

iMac:~ eji$ mount
/dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)
afp_4GAF1f0BufYh3ZIjJ83R2ENO-2.2d00000b on /Volumes/Media (afpfs, nobrowse)

Seems the "nobrowse" is the issue, no?

[sphardy]

Have you been playing with the OSX automounter?

Please post the contents of

/etc/autofs.conf
/etc/auto_master

Also how have you setup iTunes to auto mount the Media share and have you disabled that?

[nsne]

/etc/auto_master:

#
# Automounter master map
#
+auto_master # Use directory service
/net -hosts -nobrowse,hidefromfinder,nosuid
/home auto_home -nobrowse,hidefromfinder
/Network/Servers -fstab
/- -static

and /etc/autofs.conf:

#
# This file is used to configure the automounter
#

# The number of seconds after which an automounted file system will
# be unmounted if it hasn't been referred to within that period of
# time. The default is 10 minutes (600 seconds).
# This is equivalent to the -t option in automount(8).
AUTOMOUNT_TIMEOUT=3600

# If TRUE, automount(8) will print more detailed
# information about the actions it takes.
# This is equivalent to the -v option to automount(8).
#AUTOMOUNT_VERBOSE=FALSE

# If TRUE, automountd(8) will log to syslogd(8) more
# detailed information about the actions it takes.
# This is equivalent to the -v option to automountd(8).
#AUTOMOUNTD_VERBOSE=FALSE

# If TRUE, automountd(8) will disable browsing of all maps.
# This is equivalent to the -n option to automountd(8).
#AUTOMOUNTD_NOBROWSE=FALSE

# The trace level for logging information about requests received
# by automountd(8) from autofs, processing done for those requests,
# and replies sent to autofs. The default level of 0 causes no
# information to be logged; each higher value causes more information
# to be logged. This controls the same trace level that the -T option
# to automountd(8) controls.
#AUTOMOUNTD_TRACE=0

# Mount options.
# A string containing a comma-separated list of mount options
# that will be applied, by default, to all mounts done by automountd(8).
# The options for a particular mount can override these options.
# This controls the same default mount options that the -o option to
# automountd(8) controls.
AUTOMOUNTD_MNTOPTS=nosuid,nodev

# Environment variables. The format is AUTOMOUNTD_ENV=ENV=value.
# There should be one line per environment variable to be set and
# there can be as many of these lines as are required.
#AUTOMOUNTD_ENV=

[sphardy]

Those files look OK - /home and /net do automount by default but should not show on the desktop like that. Have you modified your OS settings somehow to show hidden files & folders?

Also you didn't answer: how have you setup iTunes to auto mount the Media share and have you disabled that?

[nsne]

I've enabled hidden files/folders, since it was easier than using the Terminal or downloading a third-party Finder app.

I never allowed iTunes to mount the Media share. It just did so. Back when I first got my NV+, I moved my whole iTunes folder to the NAS, and iTunes would automatically mount the Media share — although it might have helped that the desktop iTunes folder was symlinked to the NAS one.

But when my iTunes library file got borked recently, I thought it was better to have the library file on the desktop because there it would get spotted and backed up by Time Machine. So I moved the iTunes folder back and just symlinked iTunes Media (the music-file-containing subfolder) to point to the one on the NAS.

iTunes is definitely the culprit in all this, although my system is starting to get more and more wacky. iTunes routinely mounts the hidden "Media" share no matter where I tell it to look for music files. I've deleted prefs, reset mDNSresponder, everything... and then Camino (which is the only browser I use to access Frontview) started to mount the ghost "Media" share upon launch. It's all really odd.

The only other user I can find with a similar problem is this guy. And it's driving me nuts. Even if I reroute and reorganize my media folder using the visible "Media" share (ensuring that the ghost "Media") isn't mounted, iTunes still defaults to the ghost share.

[sphardy]

I think the showing of hidden files/folders is the likely reason you are getting the home and net volumes on the desktop - but that is perhaps separate to the auto mounting of shares

Why iTunes mounts the media share, I just don't know - I'd suggest completely resetting iTunes, deleting preferences, creating a new library etc.

[nsne]

I thought about redoing the whole iTunes library, and I was exhausted just by the thought of it. So I changed the local IP of the NAS and all seems to be working.

[sphardy]

WTF? So it appears that probably forcing the automount to fail was the solution? That option would never have occured to me... Thanks for the feedback ad glad you're up & running again

[nsne]

I'm going back to my initial hypothesis: something in TM is not playing well with AFP sharing. As soon as I turned TM back on, I started having problems accessing the data on the ReadyNAS via the usual methods. It looks like the TM sharepoint hijacks the means of accessing the ReadyNAS.

I thought the confusion might stem from the fact that my ReadyNAS was named "ReadyNAS," just like default TM username. So I renamed my NAS "Humphries" and rebooted all the necessary devices. As you can see from the image below, when I tried to access "Humphries" in the Finder sidebar, I was only able to see an "admin" user account (with a README.txt file) and a dead-end "ReadyNAS" sharepoint. In other words, it ended up getting caught in the inner workings of the ReadyNAS' TM implementation. This is exactly what started happening just before the ghost shares appeared, which led me to start this thread.



All my ReadyNAS shares — Media, Docs, add-ons, and so on — were only accessible through the Command-K shortcut and by manually entering "afp://Humphries.local/". Now that TM is off, things are back to normal.

I should also note that Bonjour was off on the ReadyNAS prior to re-enabling TM. It looks like TM switches Bonjour on (out of necessity?), and this might result in all the mount/sharepoint confusion.

[sphardy]

So where is Humphries (AFP)? See my first post above - you should not be connecting to just Humphries which is the TM advertised service and which is an alias for Humphries.local hat youare using with cmd+k and so the symptoms you describe are normal