AFP share only seems to work over wireless ...

[longcanadianwinter]

So ... I got my freeNAS set up a few days ago and have been successfully playing around adding storage, creating shares, adding plugins. Everything has been going swimmingly ... until ..

I've been transferring a lot of data from my Mac over to the NAS Server. It's been slow but I expected it would be. Tonight I noticed that my Mac had WiFi turned on and wondered if it could be trying to connect wirelessly (and therefore slower) so I switched it off. Suddenly the network disappeared from Finder. No more NAS visible. I rebooted the NAS Server three times and rebooted my Mac three times. Same result - I can run the freeNAS guy no problem, I can access the portal for Transmission ... but no AFP shares show up in finder, nor can I make a direct server connection to them from the machine. Turn wireless back on - problem solved! Everything comes back. My concern is that obviously I want to be taking advantage of the wired connection for better transfer rates.

My machine:
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz
6GBs Memory (I know I really need 8, upgrade is on it's way)

Any help would be greatly appreciated ..
Thanks

 

[cyberjock]

Well, there's 2 possible causes:

1. Network configuration error
2. Need more RAM. As soon as you go below that minimum 8GB of RAM things get flaky.

While I think #1 is more likely, I'd definitely get more RAM before spending considerable time troubleshooting. You don't get any "out of RAM" errors when you don't have enough. You just get crap performance and unexplainable errors(and sometimes no error messages are even given despite errors happening in the background).

 

[longcanadianwinter]

Thanks cyberjock. Having researched around the forums here I definitely think you are right about the RAM upgrade. I think before I do much else that's my next stop. Would you mind if I ask this questions here? I think it may help others too ...I noticed you have some hardware experience and have started reading your guide (thank you). First thing I noticed was that you mention RealTek NICs are known to have issues with freeNAS ... you can guess what NIC I have. Upgrades are cheap, any recommendations? Also I am researching my MB to get the right RAM and it says it supports up to 8GB in a Windows 64 Bit machine ... of course I am no longer concerned about the limitations of Windows so can I ignore this? I have attached a pdf of my MB specs.

As always appreciate your time and dedication to helping others like myself.

 

[cyberjock]

Any Intel NIC is a step up. Normally I just go to ebay and buy the cheapest used PCI express Intel NIC I can find from a reputable seller. New ones are more expensive at about $25. :P

That board and chipset is limited to 8GB of RAM. Read it more closely...

Supports up to 8 GB on 64 bit PCs
Supports up to 4 GB* on 32 bit PCs

The limitation is on hardware and isn't Windows. ;)

If 8GB of RAM won't do it(which I don't recommend only 8GB of RAM for a FreeNAS box) then you are looking at building a whole new system.

Your CPU and motherboard chipset isn't really a good fit for FreeNAS anyway, it has no support for ECC RAM, drinks power even when idle compared to today's CPUs, etc.

 

[longcanadianwinter]

Thanks again for taking the time to respond.

I'm not surprised to hear your comments about the rest of my system. Today I bought an Intel NIC and the additional RAM to at least upgrade to a level that should let me utilize this system as a bit of a test ground for the next few months. I can hopefully learn a bunch from using it. I'm mostly interested in streaming media with PLEX and what I find fascinating is that 'out of the box' NAS systems like QNap etc come with puny processors (and minimal RAM) that simply won't do the transcoding .... besides I love learning new stuff

If I can get this one to work at a decent level and if my understanding is there then I will look at investing in a barebones kit that is more geared to freeNAS - better power consumption, 16GB of RAM, that type of thing. I should be able to port over the hard disks (I bought 2 x 4TB NAS SATA disks for storage on this system) and the NIC I invested in today.

I finished your excellent guide powerpoint this afternoon ... I have a lot to learn. Thanks again for putting into the effort to help those of us on the learning curve