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File service connection failure: RN21200 2-bay home NAS
My NAS box is just a month old. It has two 6TB IronWolf drives operating in RAID 0, giving me 10.9TB effective capacity. Firmware version is 6.10.1 which is the latest as of 10 minutes ago.
Short summary: I can't connect to the file service from any device which I used to use before to read and write files successfully.
Context: this is used only on my home LAN. I don't want to use ReadyCloud or access things from outside my home.
Long version: I'll list what works first:
the web interface works. I can see all the screens, browse the content, go to various admin screens.
I can download files using the web interface.
I can ask the update manager to check for new updates -- it works and gives no error
rsync works. I can list the contents of my share by connecting to the NAS internal rsync daemon, when I connect using my command-line rsync client from my Linux laptop.
ssh works. I have logged in, poked around at the shell level and logged out.
I checked all the logs using the web browser interface. (I haven't downloaded the logs yet, just checked on-screen.) No errors.
I did a restart, both from the web interface and by physically tapping the power button twice on the front panel. It restarted successfully.
What does not work: basically the file service.
I used to connect from my Raspberry Pi box running Kodi and play my media: it cannot connect. It says "connection failed" or "connection refused".
I used to connect from my Ubuntu GUI using the Nautilus application: I had defined an SMB connection. That too is saying "connection refused".
Re: File service connection failure: RN21200 2-bay home NAS
Hi @shuvam, to use smb connections successfully the nas on the one hand and the clients on the other hand need to talk to each other at the same protocol level.
The nas on 6.10.1 by default uses SMB 3.1.1. If your clients don't you will not be able to connect. Basically you have 2 options:
1) Make your client(s) talk SMB3 or
2) Lower the protocol level on the nas side by installing app smb plus. This way you could configure the nas to talk SMB2 or lower if necessary
I would recommend to explore, whether you could configure your clients to talk SMB3. Talking that protocol level is most secure at the moment.
Re: File service connection failure: RN21200 2-bay home NAS
I am sorry if I did not explain my position clearly.
SMB 3 is quite old, and is well supported by both the Linux on LibreELEC (which runs on my RaspBerry Pi) and on my Ubuntu Linux laptop. I was actually using the ReadyNAS box from both these devices over SMB till yesterday. Therefore, this is not a case of SMB 3 support or lack of it. Something broke yesterday, without me doing anything with the NAS box, not even upgrading its firmware.
Incidentally, it seems to be purely an SMB problem. I am able to access the box over NFS very well -- I hadn't tried this till now, and it's working well now. So, my problem is now limited to SMB. And it's not about SMB level compatibility between client and server.
Re: File service connection failure: RN21200 2-bay home NAS
I found evidence of the malfunction on the GUI. For some reason, I never bothered to check back here.
The SMB service itself is switched off. I have no idea why. And when I click on that icon and try to start it, I go through all the settings, including checking the check-box which "enable SMB", and then I click "OK". The pop-up dialog box disappears, but SMB does not start.
Model: RN21200|ReadyNAS 212 Series 2- Bay (Diskless)
Re: File service connection failure: RN21200 2-bay home NAS
Dug down a bit deeper, and this is what I found by a very quick, superficial search through the raw logs. I downloaded the logs into my laptop and just ran a "grep SMB *" on all the log files. This is what I got -- see the attached file. It's clear that the SMB service is not starting up. I'll now poke around in the log files to see what else I can find.
Model: RN21200|ReadyNAS 212 Series 2- Bay (Diskless)
Re: File service connection failure: RN21200 2-bay home NAS
I poked around in the log files, found a lot of entries clearly indicating that the SMB daemon is not starting up, but couldn't figure out why. The NMB daemon is working well, it appears.
I pulled out contiguous sets of lines from three log files and created the PDF file:
systemd-journal.log
smbd.log
nmbd.log
and you can see the lines here. These are not grep outputs -- they are contiguous sets of lines, nothing omitted in between.
Any idea what is going on?
Model: RN21200|ReadyNAS 212 Series 2- Bay (Diskless)
Re: File service connection failure: RN21200 2-bay home NAS
I suggest that you send a link to the full log zip to @JohnCM_S and ask him to analyze them for you. Do that via private message (the envelope icon on the upper right of the forum page) - don't post the link publicly.
I am wondering what the 10 email alerts might say. You might want to fix the configuration for email alerts, and see if they are then sent correctly.
Re: File service connection failure: RN21200 2-bay home NAS
Hi @shuvam , while you wait for more feedback, you might want to check some things. Just my 2 cents.
In your system-journal.log there is a line saying:
"Jun 23 13:26:26 nas-c702 wsdd2[4929]: cannot read workgroup from testparm"
(1) There is a parameter "workgroup" you can set in /admin page/accounts/authentication. Please check, that is not empty.
(2) The smb configuration file could be broken. I do not know its original name; somebody else, please?. Could it have been replaced by something called "testparm"? If file testparm exists and is taken as the configuration file, is it empty (file length of 0) or read-only/protected?
In system-journal.log there is another line saying:
"Jun 23 13:26:26 nas-c702 smbd[4928]: WARNING: Ignoring invalid value '(null)' for parameter 'smb encrypt'"
(3) I had one case in the past on my guineapig nas (RN104), where smb protocol was not working, was switched off by I didn't know what and could not be enabled again. I could fix that by de-installing and re-installing app smb plus. Running through the configuration process of smb plus after the fresh install and changing something (eg set the smb encryption to "mandatory") it was forced to (re-)write a configuration file and by that fixed the problem.
Re: File service connection failure: RN21200 2-bay home NAS
@StephenB -- will send the full log zip, thanks for pointing me to the wizard. And the email alerts problem -- I've fixed it. Sent a test mail, it reached.
@Retired_Member -- I checked the workgroup name -- it's given as WORKGROUP. So, at least from the UI, there's nothing left to do. And the NULL for SMB encryption -- this too has been this way, and untouched from Day 1. It didn't stop the smbd from starting earlier. I'll just wait to get some more clarity before I specify anything in this field, I think.
Model: RN21200|ReadyNAS 212 Series 2- Bay (Diskless)
Re: File service connection failure: RN21200 2-bay home NAS
Hi shuvam,
We cannot really tell why SMB will not start on your NAS. It looks like it does start sometimes. Can you enable SDM (Secure Diagnostic Mode) on the NAS so we can take a look? You may enable it by going to System > Settings > Support on the NAS local admin page. Please PM me the 5-digit code after enabling it.
I have enabled SSH in the initial days itself, and I can log in. I created a non-root user and changed its shell from /bin/false to /bin/bash, so I can now log in as non-root over SSH too. I don't know what commands to try to start and stop services.
However, I tried starting the SMB service from the System --> Settings page of the admin web interface, and it popped up a dialog box, I clicked OK, it went through the motions of starting the service, and again reverted to the service being off. As you know, there are these long green "lights" on the web interface to show which services are active. SMB always shows inactive. Interestingly NFS shows service active, and I can't connect to NFS either, though I could till a few days back.
Any suggestions what commands I should try from the root shell prompt? I don't think it's just /etc/init.d/smbd start.
Hi @JohnCM_S I just enabled SDM and sent you PM with the 5-digit port number. Thanks for trying to help.
Model: RN21200|ReadyNAS 212 Series 2- Bay (Diskless)
The Windows SMB access seems to be working, thanks a lot. The NFS access is more complicated.
In my Nautilus file browser, when I access "Other locations", I see three entries for my NAS (screenshot attached):
an all-caps entry NAS-C702
a lower case entry nas-c702 (AFP) with "AFP" at its end
a lower case entry, just nas-c702
I don't remember seeing the first of these three 2 days ago when I had last checked. Today, I tried the first one, all-caps, and I could access the shared area on the NAS.
The second area I have always ignored, since it says "AFP" (which is an Apple protocol, I believe).
The third one is the one which I used to use: nas-c702. It had stopped working a few days ago, and it's not working even now.
You're right about NFS service working -- the "System --> Settings" screen always showed NFS with a green light, even when I stopped being able to connect to it. Now, "System --> Settings" is showing both SMB and NFS with green. The SMB is clearly a fix -- it used to indicated inactive before.
Model: RN21200|ReadyNAS 212 Series 2- Bay (Diskless)
Re: File service connection failure: RN21200 2-bay home NAS
Hi @JohnCM_S, after this finally has been solved, would you mind giving a brief abstract on what the issue was and how Netgear's resources collectively resolved it?
Of course, you do not need to provide a detailed step-by-step description of the process, but getting a rough idea of the fix would support the approach of exchanging knowledge within the community, which is what you probably want to keep alive as much as possible, right?
Re: File service connection failure: RN21200 2-bay home NAS
The smb.conf file does not look correct when we checked it so we restored that file to default to fix it.
Where did you restore the original contents from? Is there a path where the original file is stored on my NAS, from where I can restore it if it gets corrupted again?
Model: RN21200|ReadyNAS 212 Series 2- Bay (Diskless)
The ReadyNAS OS keeps a list of default config files at /etc/default/config/ (Note: Never edit any files under /etc/default/config/).
L3 did a cp -rP /etc/default/config/etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf, manually changed the workgroup since you were using a custom workgroup, and then saved and restarted samba.
