Zeroconf flaky, or just me?

[mrichardson03]

I've been fighting with my new FreeNAS box over the past week or so, trying to get network shares presented to the Macs in the house. I've torn through various parts of my setup, tweaking share settings, changing from AFP to CIFS and back again, moving from a LAG to individual interfaces, all with no success. I've narrowed the problem down to mDNSResponderPosix advertising the shares over Zeroconf/Bonjour, since in every instance using the Finder to connect directly to the shares (Go -> Connect to Server) has worked flawlessly. The Synology that this system is replacing did this fine, and this is a big point for the WAF (wife acceptance factor), and let's face it, it annoys me as well.

The one thing that has worked was turning off Zeroconf in the FreeNAS GUI, creating a jail and running Avahi to advertise the services instead. So before I go through creating a bug report, are other folks having luck with this feature?

 

[-fun-]

I have setup several shares via AFP and these are visible in my Macs just fine. One of these is used for time machine backups. (Since 9.10 there is even a decent description in the FreeNAS guide how to setup time machine with FreeNAS.)

The FreeNAS server itself is visible in Safari under the Bonjour entry. This is a shortcut to the FreeNAS server's administrative GUI. Sometimes this entry is missing however.

I did not change any settings in the AFP service, everything is setup as the default. In the datasets I have set 'Share Type' and 'Permission Type' set to Mac, in the shares's settings I have checked the 'AFP3 Unix Privs' setting.

 

[mrichardson03]

I think I've gotten to the root of this particular problem. After watching a packet capture of UDP 5353 traffic, I noticed that a lot of the Zeroconf chatter between the Macs on the network used their link-local IPv6 addresses. My FreeNAS box only had a static IPv4 address, so I checked the "Auto configure IPv6" box, bounced Samba, and browsing to shares in Finder have been rock solid ever since.

 

[-fun-]

I don't remember checking 'Auto configure IPv6' in FreeNAS (and I can't check this in the next few days) but that is a good information nonetheless.