FreeNAS 9.2.0 zerconf on CIFS broken?

[Letni]

Experts,

Just upgraded a working 9.1.1 install to 9.2.0 and on MacOS X (10.9.0/10.9.1) where I do most of my work, I now notice that in Finder, lack of "CIFS Shares on FreeNAS" presenting under Networking on the side bar "Shared" link. Still have plain old "FreeNAS" which is my configured AFP shares and other Windows machines on my network show up, but not the Zero-Conf for CIFS Services. I can still CMD-K to the "Connect To Server" Finder function and connect to FreeNAS via smb://freenas no problem.

Is this broken in 9.2.0 or is there a different setting that has to be tweaked someplace? I have made sure that under the CIFS services that "Zeroconf share discovery" is checked and have restarted CIFS services multiple times.

 

[Erwin]

The same for me. MacOS X now just shows the afp shares, and no longer the CIFS shares after upgrade to 9.2.0.
I did a workarround be renaming the Netbios Name in the CIFS service. Then the CIFS shares are displayed in MacOS X in combination with this different server name....

 

[dlavigne]

From the What's New in 9.2.0:

Avahi, also known as multicast DNS or Bonjour, is now used to register all services, including the web service. This means that you no longer need to have a monitor attached to the system to know its initial IP address, if the system your browser is running on supports mDNS. freenas.local is the default hostname, unless their are multiple FreeNAS® systems in the network, in which case the default hostname is freenas-n.local, where n is the number of that system. It also means that only one server now appears to Mac OS X Finder. If the system has AFP shares, Finder will not display any CIFS shares. This is different from 9.1 which showed one server per protocol in Finder.

 

[Erwin]

Thanks for the details. So it seems to be a architectural limitation of the browsing function the Finder tool on MacOS X side.
So whenever you provide an afp share for the Mac Time Machine, and additional Data CIFS shares for the PC and the MAC, you will run into this starting with FreeNAS® 9.2.0. To be honest, the Finder looks like a pretty incomplete thing to me, not only for this aspect. You need to manually connect (go to server) or you use a different Netbios name.

 

[Chris DeLashmutt]

Interestingly, if I register a dynamic entry with avahi using the following commands, I can see the exact setup that I had previously with one server name used for AFP shares, and one server name used for SMB shares:

avahi-publish-service -s server _smb._tcp 445 &
avahi-publish-service -s freenas _afpovertcp._tcp 548 &

Unfortunately, this works great for about 4 minutes...

 

[ECCfrenaslover]

I've just upgraded to 9.2 and I discovered the same issues! What a pain in the behind!!

I did restart the cifs service, I saw the cifs on freenas shared link just for a few minutes and then it went away for good. Can't get it to come up anymore!

When I start the service, I see this on the log window:

Code:

Jan 26 22:20:36 freenas notifier: Starting nmbd.
Jan 26 22:20:36 freenas notifier: Starting smbd.
Jan 26 22:20:36 freenas notifier: Stopping avahi-daemon.

So what is the blame? New upgrade? I will try what Erwin did and see if that works on my network. I have Macs and Windoze units. I will attack this tomorrow. Going to bed.

 

[mblund]

Did anyone find a solution for this?

 

[DerJan]

Is there any news on this? It seems like a bad trade if auto-discovering the IP of a headless system after initial install was gained for this issue.

I'm in a mixed OSX/WIN environment and all shares are CIFS. The Mac users wanted to use Time Machine so I setup an AFP share for them. Now they don't have their CIFS shares auto-discovered anymore. Is there a way to disable avahi completely to get the same situation as in the last version? Will that solve the issue?

 

[ECCfrenaslover]

Resurrected this thread from the dead uh? :)


Der Jan, how did you set up your shares to be auto discovered? I have the same as you, a mixed OSX/WIN network.

 

[cyberjock]

First, the problem, I think, is supposed to be fixed in 9.3.

Second, AFP is "dying". Apple is abandoning it in favor of CIFS. AFP has pretty much been a one-man rodeo because it's strictly on apple devices and nothing else. This is a perfect example of why proprietary isn't an advantage and the market reacted appropriately. The market ignored it... it goes away.

Now of course neither of these solve the short term problem, but there is a bug ticket on this and someone provided a solution. It's a bit hacky but if you know your way around FreeBSD CLI you should be able to implement it easily.

 

[rogerh]

As a matter of interest, to which ticket number do you refer?
Thanks in advance.

 

[ECCfrenaslover]

Peach,

is there a source you can share as to where you got the info on AFP? Not questioning you but just want to read more into it. I am not surprised is going away. I guess I better start moving all my AFP allocated data.


How hard is this FreeBSD CLI to learn? I depend on this forum a lot and I just want to learn and hopefully help in here as well...

 

[DerJan]

Resurrected this thread from the dead uh? :)

The problems seemed pretty much alive.

Der Jan, how did you set up your shares to be auto discovered? I have the same as you, a mixed OSX/WIN network.

I didn't, in version 9.2 mDNS ist just active. Using avahi-browse on another box in the network then also shows apple and windows shares provided by the machine, but Finder does not get that.

Renaming the NetBIOS name seems to cause quite some problems here and I'd rather avoid it.

Now of course neither of these solve the short term problem, but there is a bug ticket on this and someone provided a solution. It's a bit hacky but if you know your way around FreeBSD CLI you should be able to implement it easily.

What do you mean specifically? Using avahi-publish-service? I might actually try that but as he said above it seems not to work for very long.

 

[cyberjock]

I don't have direct documentation because it's so well known I don't even try to track that stuff. I'm also not a Mac professional and, to be blunt, I don't particular care that much about what Apple does or doesn't do. I just know many people have talked about AFP dying a slow death and i'm just passing on the info. There's plenty of info in this forum and via Google if you want to do your own research on the topic however.

 

[Chaosphere64]

I was just about to pull my hair out before I found this thread. So I can stop searching now. Hopefully this will be fixed soon, it affects all MAC owners using TM and CIFS shares.

 

[DerJan]

I kind of fixed the issue. To the [Global] section of /usr/local/etc/afp.conf I added the line 'hostname=timemachine'. However, when the service is started, this config file is re-created from the WebGUI Settings so I also had to edit /usr/local/libexec/nas/generate_afpd_conf.py to add this line as well. You need to remount the USB disk as read/write to do this.

Now, when starting AFP I see two entris in finder. One is the name of the FreeNAS machine itself with the CIFS shares and a timemachine entry that serves the AFP shares.

My suggestion would be to allow configuring the AFP hostname from the WebGUI.

 

[rogerh]

Do you think it would work to have a lmhosts (or hosts) file with two different hostnames for the freeNAS server IP, or do you think they would need two different IP addresses as well?