OSX machines constantly disconnect from ReadyNAS

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dtarin wrote:

I haven't heard any complaints about the server from people who's machines who now have put drives to sleep option as off.  It may have done the trick.

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Good news, thank you for the update.

Unfortunatley, Apple does after decades not get a reliable proprietary SMB client implementation on thier proprietary OS to the field. Leaving SAMBA towards thier proprietary protocol implementation wasn't helping much (as expected) - except for adding even more non-transparent things to the user base. Almost every update does lead to new tiny issues and oddities - and this happened the second time in the year 2020 already now.

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dtarin wrote:

I'll continue monitoring but that little change seems promising.

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Let me come back to the idea of manually tweaking the ReadyNAS (or any other SAMBA based NAS) protocol requirements.

Leaving AFP alone, MacOS does only offer cifs and smb. Using

smb://server/public

does lead to

smbutil statshares -m /Volumes/public/
...

SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB1_ENABLED

SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB2_ENABLED
SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB3_ENABLED
SMB_VERSION SMB_3.02

So this is the highest common protocol version negotiated between Apple's SMB client and the NAS. Using

cifs://server/public

does lead to

smbutil statshares -m /Volumes/public/
...
SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB1_ONLY
SMB_VERSION SMB_1

So SMB 1.0, the legacy "CIFS" version.

What makes sense on a NAS - permitting there are no legacy clients on a network (!!!) is to put the minimum version to v2 or v3.0 so no old protocol weaknesses can be abused by sniffing the traffic, or denying using unsigned or whatever feature.

What does not make much sense is to limit the highest v3 protocol version. Unless there are specific issues where an SMB client can't deal with the highest SMB version available on the server, leave it up to the NAS to offer the best possible protocol version. One day any SMB protocol or client OS maker does decide that say 3.02 isn't good enough, so you have to take admin actions again.

Leave the highest available to the SMB protocol version negotiation between the SMB client (Windows can, MacOS can, ...) and the NAS.