Making Time Machine work with the ReadyNAS

Hi all,

I've been banging my head against this for a while now and could use some help.

I've followed the instructions and essentially:

1. Created the sparceimage.
Using the instructions mentioned, and some other comments, I created this shell script to create the target sparceimage file:

# The maximum size the image can expand to, in gigabytes.
SIZE_G="300"
# This band size makes it allocate 64 meg blocks (131072 * 512 byte sectors = 64m),
# for 16 files per gig of backup. This saves space and helps performance.
BAND_SIZE="131072"

GREP_B="/usr/bin/grep"
HDIUTIL_B="/usr/bin/hdiutil"
IFCONFIG_B="/sbin/ifconfig"
HOSTNAME_B="/bin/hostname"
RSYNC_B="/usr/bin/rsync"
SED_B="/usr/bin/sed"
AWK_B="/usr/bin/awk"
DEFAULTS_B="/usr/bin/defaults"

HOSTNAME=`${HOSTNAME_B} | ${SED_B} -e 's/.local//g'`
echo "Hostname: \"${HOSTNAME}\""

MAC=`${IFCONFIG_B} en0 | ${GREP_B} ether | ${AWK_B} '{print $2}'`
echo "en0 MAC address: \"${MAC}\""

BUNDLE_NAME="${HOSTNAME}_`echo ${MAC} | ${SED_B} -e 's/://g'`.sparsebundle"
echo "Derrived sparsebundle name: \"${BUNDLE_NAME}\""

VOL_NAME="Backup of ${HOSTNAME}"
echo "Derrived volume name: \"${VOL_NAME}\""

${HDIUTIL_B} create -size ${SIZE_G}g -imagekey sparse-band-size=${BAND_SIZE} -type SPARSEBUNDLE -fs "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" -volname "${VOL_NAME}" -nospotlight -verbose "${BUNDLE_NAME}"

which was created as "Aleph_001ec2074404.sparsebundle" since my "Computer Name" appears to be "Aleph" (this value was a little unclear to me as to where it actually comes from) if one looks in the "Sharing" preference pane:



2. Uploaded the empty sparceimage to my user share on my NAS at the root directory.

3. Updated my "defaults" so Time Machine (TM) sees the network volume.
It seems it was necessary for me to update the setting in order for TM to see my NAS mounted network volume (I tried without setting this first and the volume did not show up in TM). So, I executed this on the command line:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

4. Configured Time Machine
I opened the TM preference pane, selected "Choose Backup Disk..." and selected my user share volume.

5. Unmount my user share...
I found I had to unmount my user share before TM tried to perform a backup because it would fail to unmount/remount the volume with backupd as the owner, giving an error block like this in the console:

8/11/08 16:39:37 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[43513] Starting standard backup 
8/11/08 16:39:37 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[43513] Network mountpoint /Volumes/labrown not owned by backupd... remounting 
8/11/08 16:39:38 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[43513] [SnapshotUtilities remountVolumeRef] url could not be resolved via BonJour 
8/11/08 16:39:38 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[43513] Failed to remount network volume. 
8/11/08 16:39:43 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[43513] Backup failed with error: 19 

6. Let Time Machine try to backup
So, either by the 120 second countdown or by manually kicking it off from the TM menu, TM starts to perform a backup and almost immediately throws up an error dialog saying "The backup volume could not be mounted." and spits this out in the console:

8/11/08 16:55:38 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[43695] Starting standard backup 
8/11/08 16:55:40 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[43695] FSMatchAliasBulk returned -5023 while resolving alias to backup target 
8/11/08 16:55:45 /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[43695] Backup failed with error: 19 

Stuck
Error -5023 is:

  afpUserNotAuth                = -5023, /* No AFPLogin call has successfully been made for this session */

Which suggests to me that TM was unable to mount my user share volume in order to get access to the sparceimage and proceed. I have tried various Mac keychain tricks and have deleted the password entry for the nas in my keychain, gone through the TM setup again and had it ask me for the username/password, etc. all with the same results. I have mounted the share via the Finder, saved the password in the keychain, tried again, and same error.

Some googling yielded this discussion which mentions error -5023, and perhaps other places in my travels I ran into someone with a similar error trying to backup to a Linux box who suggested that re-compiling his implementation of APF with "the latest version" seemed to fix it. Of course, I can't quite to that, but I have installed the AFP addon before trying all this.

So, is this a known AFP issue on the ReadyNAS NV+, or other ideas?

Thanks,

Levi