4.1.7 Slow To Respond To SMB Network Discovery...

Well, I for one am very glad I read this thread before I bought a new NAS. I am using a Duo given to me by a friend who moved on, as I will. I have out grown the duo and am looking for a 4 bay unit, had seriously considered a Ultra before reading this entire thread.... kept waiting for Netgear to acknowledge the issue and say a fix was in the works and would be out soon, 6 months of silence is un-acceptable and I will not do business with a company that takes your money and then just forgets about you. I was also going to upgrade my Netgear router but will instead go with D-Link. Looks like Netgear has lost another customer, I wonder how many owners that posted here with this issue without so much as a nod from their customer support will change to another brand.

... and what garantee will you have that Dlink doesnt solve a perticular problem you will run into ...

My overall point being ... this product consists of more than the initial respons time of a SMB-call, and it consists of more that the respons time to a particular problem by the service appartment. It may be A negative part ... but how many and which negative parts of functionality and service respons will a DLink product have...>?

Bascy wrote:
I can understand the frustration of not getting enough and adequate respons to a Samba problem ... but if it is so important to you, why would you want to move the NV to a family member ??? Not only will you be burdened with the complaints that family member will have .. but he/she will probably blaim you for selling/giving him/her a product with which you yourself weren't very satisfied??

I've left it on 4.1.6 because of all the problems surrounding 4.1.7, and also this version works fine for what most people need/require. Some of the benefits in 4.1.7 I personally would have found useful (better rsync options etc.) but it's not a must-have upgrade for most ordinary users.

I would very much like to upgrade to 4.1.7 while I still have the NV, but that's out of the question while these issues remain and judging by the current response level from Netgear, a fix isn't likely.

PS. It would have been gifted to family members. And I would have warned them not to upgrade it from 4.1.6 on threat of being written out of my will. :)

Bascy wrote:

... and what garantee will you have that Dlink doesnt solve a perticular problem you will run into ... My overall point being ... this product consists of more than the initial respons time of a SMB-call, and it consists of more that the respons time to a particular problem by the service appartment. It may be A negative part ... but how many and which negative parts of functionality and service respons will a DLink product have...>?

I can't imagine this poor response occurring during the Infrant days, ergo it's a change of support policy following the Netgear takeover. Happens to all the small, well run, innovative companies in the end once the big boys buy them out.

Sure, D-Link may have their skeletons in the closet - search their forum, see if you can dig any up. If not, they're probably worth a punt as a viable alternative to a company that can be positively identified as being guilty of ignoring it's own customers complaints.

The disjointed level of support being given in this thread along with several cases being opened then closed, logs being submitted but still zero progress just reeks of someone in support stringing everyone in this thread along hoping they eventually give up (either dropping back to 4.1.6, moving to another product or dying of old age). I find it quite hard to believe that in the months following the first reports of this issue they haven't been able to identify the difference between 4.1.6 and 4.1.7, or simulate this problem in a lab. Maybe I shouldn't be so sniffy about this as I'm moving on, but it's sad to see what Infrant has become.

This is a long thread and having multiple users posting about issues they are having in a long thread isn't necessarily a good idea for posts to get noticed. Issues can vary from user to user (though they think the issue is the same, the cause can be quite different). It can also be difficult to keep track of whose problems have been solved and whose haven't.

A thread with the case number in the title (title of first post) is generally the best way to go.

Cases are automatically closed after a period of inactivity, as it's assumed that if you don't post on an Online Case for say a few weeks or so that your issue is resolved.

I just had a look at the Dlink website and in my view it's a poor choice. 1 year warranty is poor.

The community forum for the ReadyNAS is much better.

Hi Mdgm,

I feel that your post is quite inappropriate. The contributors to this thread appear to have related, if not identical, issues. Keeping them together makes good sense.

There have been posts from Netgear staff engaging us on the issue. We have provided the requested supporting logs and material to Netgear. I have offered to allow Netgear remote access to my network so that the problem can be directly witnessed. The last message from Netgear was to hold on while the matter was investigated. We were promised further updates and that the matter hadn't been forgotten. This was quite a while ago and nothing has been said or done since.

Pointing at other manufacturers and rubbishing their products and support is simply poor form.

Your comment about the ReadyNAS community forum being much better doesn't seem very appropriate or comforting at this point.

Regards,
Ian.

IanSav wrote:
I feel that your post is quite inappropriate. The contributors to this thread appear to have related, if not identical, issues. Keeping them together makes good sense.

Well perhaps that is the case here. It appears I could have been a little hasty and made a mistake here. All too often though people have issues and post in the one thread and it turns out their issues are actually very different and gets confusing.

IanSav wrote:
Pointing at other manufacturers and rubbishing their products and support is simply poor form.

Someone was suggesting another product just above and was asking for opinions. So I thought as a fellow ReadyNAS user I'd give an opinion. If the competitor product was not mentioned then I would not have commented on it.

Bascy wrote:
My overall point being ... this product consists of more than the initial respons time of a SMB-call, and it consists of more that the respons time to a particular problem by the service appartment.

Yes, that's true - and at least for me this bug is not a major issue (since I seldom reboot my NAS and only then the issue reoccurs).
But the fact of not receiving any help scares me. What if I'd face a more serious issue? I don't think that Netgear really cares about me and the problems I do have with their product. That's not what good customer relatioship is about. And, as I've said, people start caring about service (again). The times of "cheap, cheaper, the cheapest" are over. Customers have learned the lesson - and are now more selective on their partners.

Hi WSJ,

Not that the ReadyNAS is a particularly "cheap" unit. For the money charged they could make some effort to address this issue.

As you pointed out this issue is at its worst when the NAS is restarted. Once you bounce the SMB service it appears stable until the next restart. This is, however, a workaround. The underlying problem should be fixed. :)

Regards,
Ian.

Earlier in this thread someone said

What I thought I saw during the enumeration were attempts to connect to two addresses that are not active (or even valid for my home subnet) viz something like 10.1.1.6 and 10.1.1.7, which eventually time out. I'm starting to wonder if there's some stale information in a tdb file somewhere.

If Netgear is testing this in an environment where these addresses are valid, this (or another similar issue) could explain why only Netgear is unaffected by this issue.

In any case, restarting Samba seems like a good enough workaround. My 4.1.7 is running fine now, and I assume it will continue to until the next reboot.