ReadyNAS Duo 4.1.8 and OS X Lion 10.7.2

I've just spent far too long looking into this.

1) CIFS/Samba shares work just fine. You can connect to afp shares using cmd-K, but the bonjour advertising of shares (including itunes server etc) is not working.

2) Time Machine seems to work if you have the TM backup otpion enabled on FrontView and you mount the afp share manually as above.

Avahi seems to be broken in Raidiator 4.1.8, at least when it comes to working with 10.7.2 Very frustrating.

Also, I learned that netatalk 2.2 does its own bonjour advertising so the afp.service for avahi is in theory no longer required. However, the netatalk broadcasting doesn't show up in finder in 10.7.2 either.

This is a real killer for me as I just bought the Duo to act as a backup server for our mixed network at home (mac, linux & windows). Hopefully by the time 4.1.9 comes out, these things can be ironed out.

If manually mounting the TM share works then you could configure your Macs to automatically mount the TM share on login as a temporary workaround.

The problem seems to be with the avahi services cease to be advertised. Found this response from an avahi developer in this bug report https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/avahi/+bug/624043

This seems to describe something very similar to what I have experienced. The various services drop out over time, with afp going first. I guess afp has the shortest timeout.
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Trent Lloyd (lathiat) wrote on 2010-10-25: #10 Hi All, Trent Lloyd here - one of the authors of the Avahi project The cause of this situation is relatively simple, in all cases I have seen it is caused by a faulty network driver. You will find after you restart Avahi - services work for a few minutes and then they fail again - here is the cause => When Avahi starts, it broadcasts out to the network services exists => Machines discover the service and add it to the list of available services => Once it nears the expiry time, a query is sent out for the services => No response is received, because multicast functionality in the network card driver is broken.. multicast queries never reach the avahi daemon => Avahi detects this as a "Passive observation of failure" and removes the services from the service list (Mac OS X Bonjour does the same) The fix is to get a different network card with a working driver support for multicast - or fix the network card driver - it would be useful to post your "lspci" outputs to the issue to identify what kind of network cards you have and mention which one it is (ethernet or wireless) Is most common on wireless but does occur on some ethernet drivers as well.

Perhaps your wireless router has multicast disabled or doesn't support it.

My MacBook on wireless is still able to browse avahi services from a linux box wired to the same router as the ReadyNAS Duo, and also the zeroconf service advertised by my wireless printer. Similarly, here is the output of avahi-browse -a on the linux box (craptop)

user@craptop:~$ avahi-browse -a
+   eth1 IPv4 rorzer___s MacBook                        Microsoft Windows Network local
+   eth1 IPv4 rorzer___s MacBook                        Apple File Sharing   local
+   eth1 IPv4 Brother HL-2170W series                       Internet Printer     local
+   eth1 IPv4 Brother HL-2170W series                       UNIX Printer         local
+   eth1 IPv4 Brother HL-2170W series                       PDL Printer          local
+   eth1 IPv4 craptop [00:15:c5:6e:53:12]                   Workstation          local
+   eth1 IPv4 craptop                                       Remote Disk Management local
+   eth1 IPv4 Brother HL-2170W series                       Web Site             local
+   eth1 IPv4 rorzer's remote desktop on craptop             Web Site             local
+   eth1 IPv4 rorzer's remote desktop on craptop             VNC Remote Access    local
+   eth1 IPv6 craptop [00:15:c5:6e:53:12]                   Workstation          local
+   eth1 IPv6 rorzer's remote desktop on craptop             VNC Remote Access    local
+   eth1 IPv6 rorzer's remote desktop on craptop             Web Site             local
+   eth1 IPv6 craptop                                       Remote Disk Management local

IPv6 is disabled on the mac as the wireless router at work has broken ipv6 support.

Here's the output of avahi-browse straight after I run /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon restart:

~$ avahi-browse -a
+   eth1 IPv6 craptop [00:15:c5:6e:53:12]                   Workstation          local
+   eth1 IPv4 ReadyNAS_Duo [e0:46:9a:73:7c:a9]              Workstation          local
+   eth1 IPv4 craptop [00:15:c5:6e:53:12]                   Workstation          local
+   eth1 IPv6 craptop                                       Remote Disk Management local
+   eth1 IPv4 craptop                                       Remote Disk Management local
+   eth1 IPv6 roryg's remote desktop on craptop             Web Site             local
+   eth1 IPv4 Brother HL-2170W series                       Web Site             local
+   eth1 IPv4 roryg's remote desktop on craptop             Web Site             local
+   eth1 IPv6 roryg's remote desktop on craptop             VNC Remote Access    local
+   eth1 IPv4 roryg's remote desktop on craptop             VNC Remote Access    local
+   eth1 IPv4 ReadyNAS_Duo (TM)                             Apple TimeMachine    local
+   eth1 IPv4 ReadyNAS Discovery [ReadyNAS_Duo]             _readynas._tcp       local
+   eth1 IPv4 ReadyNAS_Duo (AFP)                            _device-info._tcp    local
+   eth1 IPv4 Rory Grant___s MacBook                        Microsoft Windows Network local
+   eth1 IPv4 ReadyNAS_Duo (AFP)                            Apple File Sharing   local
+   eth1 IPv4 Rory Grant___s MacBook                        Apple File Sharing   local
+   eth1 IPv4 Brother HL-2170W series                       Internet Printer     local
+   eth1 IPv4 Brother HL-2170W series                       UNIX Printer         local
+   eth1 IPv4 Brother HL-2170W series                       PDL Printer          local

Here's the IGMP section from my router

IGMP Proxy:	Enabled  
IGMP Querier Version:	2
Query Interval::	 125 seconds
Querier Immediate Leave:  Enabled

I'll try disabling the Querier immediate leave setting, to see if that helps, but I don't think it's the router that's the problem. I suspect it's software on the ReadyNAS, either to do with the avahi-daemon itself, or, as Trent suggests, some problem with the ethernet driver in 4.1.8

And the DTIM info from the wireless setup:

Beacon Interval:	100   (Default: 100, Milliseconds, Range: 1 - 65535)
DTIM Interval:	  1  (Default: 1, Range: 1 ~ 255)

As I understand it, this means that multicast packets are passed on every 1X100milliseconds.

Thanks for the comments and observations.

To summarize
- CIFS works well, but AFP may give some troubles.
- However Time Machine correctly configured from Frontview actually works (using AFP).

This is good enough for me - means I need not wait for 10.7.3 (or ReadyNAS upgrade)

Right?

Problem may lie in the way mDNSResponder lib on Lion works, and services that define the way it work. I discovered that HandsOff! app firewall service messes a lot with it. After I removed it, mDNSResponder stopped crashing and invoking avahi failures on ReadyNAS NV+ (sparc) in my network.

(update) This is Lion issue. handsOff! had its own bug. Looks like resolver works other way in Lion and ReadyNAS avahi daemon cannot handle that.

I was using Lion 10.7.2 along with ReadyNAS Duo v1 until very recently and it works great via AFP.

No issues.