FreeNAS, TimeMachine, and Mountain Lion

[Credo]

Hello All,

I'm wondering - with the availability of Mountain Lion around the corner - if anyone's managed to run any beta versions of the new OS with FreeNAS to see if we're going to have those ugly issues we had last time with AppleTalk and the changes made to the TimeMachine protocols.

Does anyone know if we're going to run into the same things with M.L. or are we good to upgrade?

Thanks in advance!
~C.

 

[louisk]

I haven't had any issues. I've been running it since DP1.

 

[Credo]

That's great news! Now maybe you could answer this question for me too:

Have they included some sort of iSCSI initiator in this release? I'm not paying for GlobalScape's iteration when this "should" be free/built in...

 

[louisk]

I've never investigated iSCSI. I think it's a horrible architecture. If you're unsure, think about how systems react when a disk disappears from a running system. They crash. Now imagine how often a network goes up and down. Think about your machines going up and down. Ick. I would stick to something like AFP for mac. NFS for UNIX. If you have $ for FC, it is awesome.

 

[Hasuppa]

Does it still work in the final version that was released yesterday?

 

[louisk]

It works with the GM that went out a week or so ago. Supposedly there is no difference between that and what is now shipping. There have been no updates to the GM since it went out. I haven't tried uninstalling and installing what is shipping.

 

[voipguy]

TimeMachine keeps getting disconnected

Im using Mt. Lion and Freenas 8.2 my time machine started working and now I get a message Time Machine Couldn't complete the backup, the backup disk is not available.

Any Suggestions?
Thanks

 

[voipguy]

My first time machine backup completes ok, but when it tries to backup again I get Time Machine Couldn't Complete, the backup disk is not avail any suggestions anyone? Thanks

 

[seggerman]

I'm running ML since Wednesday and everything worked fine. No problems at all. Running 8.2p1

Best

Alexander

 

[nas7]

[there is an update for this problem in a message below in this thread]

Hello.

I had the same problem as voipguy, with Mountain Lion, FreeNAS 8.2p1 and Time Machine. When I was going to post my own problem in this forum, I couldn't. For some reason I couldn't post as the web pages time out. After several hours debugging I realized that Mountain Lion has a bug in the MTU calculation for the network. Searching in the Internet I found that it has been reported already in several places. This problem not only affected my ability to post in this forum, but it is also the reason that Time Machine don't work with FreeNAS 8.2p1 (and probably with any other version too).

The workaround is to force the MTU to a reasonable value (even 1500 the maximum could be a reasonable value, as in my test, my MacBook even reached 1514 which is normally bad in Fast Ethernet). There are several ways to calculate the right size manually and those methods are described in the net, so I won't post the instructions here (just look MTU ping test in Google).

I hope this solves the problem for the Mountain Lion users with FreeNAS until Apple releases a patch.

 

[nas7]

Correction: it still has random failures during Time Machine backups. Stopping and Starting the AFP service seem to reset the issue for the next backup. Even when TM can not see the TM backup volume, the volume can be mounted. I will continue debugging this, I will welcome any suggestion.

 

[birdd]

I'm having this same problem as well... I thought it was something I messed up in freenas maybe... but it seems maybe not seeing that others are having the same issue... Its a little bit annoying as I want my backups to be stable and reliable... I hope they fix it soon...

 

[nas7]

I have debugged this a little more. After the first TM backup it seems that the Time Machine service stops being advertised. Trying to edit the TM volume through the TM Preferences the volume won't appear. Stopping and restarting the service through the graphical interface makes it appear, and that seems to be due to the fact that the avahi-deamon gets restarted. To test this I restarted the AFP service and then tried to perform a backup twice to get the error. Then I restarted the avahi-deamon in the FreeNAS manually and after that the TM backup worked. So now I think there should be an error in the avahi-deamon that for some reason the Time Machine service stops being advertised and that causes that the next and following TM backup fails due to the fact that the Volume is not available.

 

[nas7]

Question to the persons that have this problem with Mountain Lion? Did you upgrade from an older version of FreeNAS or did you install it from bare metal?

 

[birdd]

I did a clean install of FreeNAS... and I also did a clean install of Mountain Lion...

 

[phiku]

Hi there,

I'm using Mountain Lion and Freenas 8.0.4 p3 multimedia and it is working like a charm. I've run a Freenas 8.2p1 too and this won't work. I think there is something wrong with the AFP or avahi-service, because I can't modify any Volume and dataset permissions on the 8.2p1 System.

 

[trevorault]

Hi, I am having very similar issues. I just upgraded to 8.2 from 8.0. I am running Lion and Snow Leopard on two different machines and Time Machine, AFP, NFS, SMB, and the webGUI all go out sporadically. I can get them back after restarting the services or re-booting Freenas. This must be an issue with 8.2 and not exclusive to Mountain Lion.

Intel SS-4200e, 1GB RAM
4x SATA ZFS Raid5 AFP/CIFS/SMB

 

[nas7]

Hi there,

I'm using Mountain Lion and Freenas 8.0.4 p3 multimedia and it is working like a charm. I've run a Freenas 8.2p1 too and this won't work. I think there is something wrong with the AFP or avahi-service, because I can't modify any Volume and dataset permissions on the 8.2p1 System.

Hi.

I downgraded from 8.2 to 8.0.4 p3 and the problem is still there for me. I even installed it from scratch but using the same ZFS volume for data and the problem remains.

Does anybody know if this is a reported bug for 8.2? I looked into the bug database and it seems that the bug was reported in a previous version but it is not present in 8.2.

Thanks,


nas7

 

[sully]

I'm having a very similar issues, to what's being reported above, with Time Machine and AFP.

My MBP running 10.8.1 (Mountain Lion) can see the newly created AFP share. Permissions are in check and everything seems to be gravy. I start the TM backup and it backup progress starts. Ultimately, the backup will stop as AFP share, I believe disappears. (e.g. when the TM backup starts, a TM Disk will appear on the Desktop. When the TM Backup stops, the Disk disappears).

I'm confident that the permissions are correct on the AFP share as TM is saving a sparsebundle in the directory.

Unfortunately, I'm still a n00b at the overall FreeNAS environment and not sure how to troubleshoot why the backup is timing out or canceling randomly.

System Spec:
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DS5
CPU: AMD Phenom II
RAM: 8GB Corsair
HD: 12TB RAIDZ2 (6x 2TB WD Greens)
FreeNAS version: FreeNAS-8.0.4-RELEASE-p3-x64

 

[sully]

I'm having a very similar issues, to what's being reported above, with Time Machine and AFP.

My MBP running 10.8.1 (Mountain Lion) can see the newly created AFP share. Permissions are in check and everything seems to be gravy. I start the TM backup and it backup progress starts. Ultimately, the backup will stop as AFP share, I believe disappears. (e.g. when the TM backup starts, a TM Disk will appear on the Desktop. When the TM Backup stops, the Disk disappears).

I'm confident that the permissions are correct on the AFP share as TM is saving a sparsebundle in the directory.

Unfortunately, I'm still a n00b at the overall FreeNAS environment and not sure how to troubleshoot why the backup is timing out or canceling randomly.

System Spec:
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DS5
CPU: AMD Phenom II
RAM: 8GB Corsair
HD: 12TB RAIDZ2 (6x 2TB WD Greens)
FreeNAS version: FreeNAS-8.0.4-RELEASE-p3-x64

Update:

I noticed something yesterday that wasn't immediately apparent, when I restarted NAS, most of my BIOS settings were lost and were defaulting to fail-safe defaults. Turns out, my CMOS battery was shot. At the same time, I took the opportunity to updates my bios from revision F4 to rev F8i. Weirdly enough, I'm now able to successfully backup to the NAS via Time Machine. I tested this on two different Macs, one running 10.8.1 (ML) and the other running 10.7 (Lion), both successfully backed up to the NAS.

Weird but figured I'd update thread.