Intermittent access to AFP and SMB shares on local network
I've been struggling with an issue since I bought an RN 316 for my company office. I have 13 or so staff and 25 computers some windows pc and some mac some laptop and some desktop.
AFP and SMB shares on our NAS intermittently become unreachable via the zero conf broadcast mechanisms (bonjour and uPNP) they seem to remain reachable by IP. I've tried several things to improve the situation but I've basically failed.
My latest searches relating to this led me to discussions about various machines fighting for "master browser" status over the network. This may lead to conflicts and periods when there is no master browser, which might lead to machines being unreachable by the name advertised in Mac Finder and Windows explorer.
I'm finding it hard to find out how to improve this situation and wondered if anyone on these forums has seen a similar problem and know what the problem might be. It appears to be an issue which people have with a number of different NAS devices and is more of a network issue than a device issue.
from the command line will list whether you have multiple Master browsers or not on your local subnet. I found I had two responses often and sometimes intermittent switches of response from one IP to another. Found this script command via google which gives more info:
root@StudioReadyNAS:~# nmblookup -M -- - | grep -v querying | while read sw; do echo $sw | awk -F' ' '{print $1}' | xargs smbclient -L ; done WARNING: The "null passwords" option is deprecated Enter root's password: Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 4.0.9]
Sharename Type Comment --------- ---- ------- IPC$ IPC IPC Service ("StudioReadyNAS") Videos Disk Video folder readydrop Disk Pictures Disk Picture folder Music Disk Music folder dropbox Disk synchronized with Dan's dropbox as folder ReadyNAS Documents Disk Document folder Capsule Disk Time Capsule Content Backup Disk Backup folder Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 4.0.9]
Server Comment --------- ------- BRNEFF779 CLOUD-PC LP-ACER-TEST-01 LP-ACER-TEST-02 LP-ACER-TEST-03 STEVES-MAC-PRO Steve's Mac Pro STUDIOREADYNAS StudioReadyNAS
I didn't capture the output I got yesterday from this but it showed me that I had two different windows workgroup names on my network - The NAS seems to have a default workgroup "VOLUME" while other machines have a default workgroup "WORKGROUP" I changed the NAS to have the WORKGROUP workgroup name (this is not where you might expect it to be - its in the users authentication settings when using local user accounts as I do on this NAS at the moment) and that superficially seems to have improved things on both AFP and SMB shares. Not sure why this would affect AFP as I thought that workgroups was a windows / smb specific thing to do with WINS and AFP is Bonjour and mDNS. Can these multicast zero conf protocols interfere with one another?
