AFP shares dont show in finder

[b88]

Hi,

I have a couple of afp shares, timemachines and smb shares (separate datasets) and i am having stability issues. The freenas server doesnt show up in the finder sidabar nor in go->networks. If i restart the afp service on freenas, it shows up in finder. If i switch between wired and wlan or put the client in standby, the freenas server disapears again until afp service is restarted.

I have seens some threads about this in 2015, but couldnt find anything helpful.

I guess this is not due to netatalk, but rather due to me not knowing how to setup the afp service properly. I had a synology nas for some time and never had this issue, the nas popped up as soon as i was connected to lan.

How do you setup the afp service properly to be more stable? Also how can i make sure the server is found faster when connecting to lan? Could this be some advertisment setting?

Ps: i can connect to the server using ‘connect to server’ or ‘cmd + k’, but then the server is shown as a questionmark symbol in finder and is only stable for a couple of minutes.

Client: osx sierra,
macbook air

Server: freenas 11.1
Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C3558 @ 2.20GHz

Best regards

 

[nightshade00013]

AFP is no longer under active development. However SMB is widely supported. Someone not long ago was having issues with AFP and stuff not showing/disappearing they switched to SMB and it was just fine. Mac's will also support NFS if I remember correctly so your honest best bet is to switch sharing protocols.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/que...d-to-be-removed-from-future-versions-of-macos

 

[b88]

I've heard that apple wants to drop afp, which seems like a real shame. I get 2X faster transfers with afp. I am not very familiar with NFS, but i think that the permissions are bound to the servers local uids and i need a user with the same uid on the client right?

AFP was a lot more stable before i updated to freenas 11.1-release. I guess netatalk was updated and/or forked?
It would be really nice to have AFP as long as apple is supporting this. SMB is more stable, but 45MB/s is a shame on a gigabit ethernet, when afp is giving more than 100MB/s.

 

[c32767a]

I've heard that apple wants to drop afp, which seems like a real shame. I get 2X faster transfers with afp. I am not very familiar with NFS, but I think that the permissions are bound to the servers local uids and I need a user with the same uid on the client right?

AFP was a lot more stable before I updated to freenas 11.1-release. I guess netatalk was updated and/or forked?
It would be really nice to have AFP as long as apple is supporting this. SMB is more stable, but 45MB/s is a shame on a gigabit ethernet, when afp is giving more than 100MB/s.

If you've run AFP on freenas long enough, you know that every once in a while a version pops up that causes problems. Sometimes it's not freenas' fault, sometimes it is. Typically it's an AFPd problem and it goes away in the "next" version. 11.0 was one of those wonky releases for us. We had some issues with server instances not being browsable in the finder, but Go->connect to server->afp://ipaddress/ always worked. 11.1 seems to have returned to normalcy.

We also see issues with macbooks on wireless. OSX seems to have intermittant issues with suspend and resume and holding on to AFP shares. force quitting and relaunching the finder seems to be the quickest way we've found to resolve that.

AFP support is still important until Apple decides what they're going to do about network file systems in general and time machine in particular. Their SMB implementation is bad, and NFS adds a whole lot of complexity to their point and click universe.

Plus, APFS and snapshots are snazzy and all, but it's hard to fix a total disk failure with a snapshot..

 

[b88]

Ok just upgraded to: FreeNAS-11.1-U1 and it seems to be the same issue.
However i discovered that if you turn on SMB service and enable Zeroconf, this enables avahi?
Why would avahi be disabled when using afp shares? This doesnt seem to make sense.

If i enable zeroconf, the server is visible as a Xserve unit on OsX and also shows up as a Osx server on a debian client running netatalk.
I might be mistaken, but if zerofconf really enables AND disables avahi in SMB service settings, this might be the issue.
The "?" explains that avahi is used to make the samba share visible to, in particular, OsX devices. I would also like afp shares to be advertised though :p

This doesn't seem like a big issue ...

Someone got a better explanation?

 

[c32767a]

Ok just upgraded to: FreeNAS-11.1-U1 and it seems to be the same issue.
However I discovered that if you turn on SMB service and enable Zeroconf, this enables avahi?
Why would avahi be disabled when using afp shares? This doesnt seem to make sense.

If I enable zeroconf, the server is visible as a Xserve unit on OsX and also shows up as a Osx server on a debian client running netatalk.
I might be mistaken, but if zerofconf really enables AND disables avahi in SMB service settings, this might be the issue.
The "?" explains that avahi is used to make the samba share visible to, in particular, OsX devices. I would also like afp shares to be advertised though :p

This doesn't seem like a big issue ...

Someone got a better explanation?

I forgot one other thing, we change the netbios name to "severname-SMB". Recent versions of OSX will prefer SMB if the netbios name and afp name are the same. This caused us issues.. I got tired of fighting with OSX and just renamed things.. Life in the walled garden sucks sometimes.

 

[b88]

I forgot one other thing, we change the netbios name to "severname-SMB". Recent versions of OSX will prefer SMB if the netbios name and afp name are the same. This caused us issues.. I got tired of fighting with OSX and just renamed things.. Life in the walled garden sucks sometimes.

That seems like a good idea to have them pop up separately. Haven't tested that yet on OsX, but the issue with avahi still remains. I think avahi should be a separate service since this concerns both smb and afp share advertising, and if it is turned off for the smb service, this should not turn off the avahi for afp.
I am not using smb at all and am only interested in afp.

Will check how it looks in finder after the update when i get home, but i like that change.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I cannot reproduce your issues with FreeNAS not showing up in the finder via Bonjour. I, too, have been running FreeNAS with strictly AFP for years.

As soon as I enable SSH access on a fresh installation, absolutely no sharing yet, the system is resolvable on the command line as freenas-pmh.local for ping or ssh and co.

When AFP is enabled, the server shows up as an Xserve image in the Finder as freenas-pmh as it should.

I can recommend a somewhat outdated but working tool named Bonjour Browser to troubleshoot zeroconf issues. There's a more current tool on Sourceforge that I have not yet tried.

I can confirm that Macs tend to act really weird if you have AFP and CIFS shares advertised for the same hostname. That's why I use NFS for my Infuse media player on the AppleTV in my living room. R/W AFP share to manage my media files from my Mac, R/O NFS share to play on the big screen.

Kind regards,
Patrick

 

[b88]

I cannot reproduce your issues with FreeNAS not showing up in the finder via Bonjour. I, too, have been running FreeNAS with strictly AFP for years.
Patrick

It seems that this is partly related to ipv6. I enabled ipv6 auto config for my one and only interface and now the server always shows up! Login is a lot faster and more stable! TimeMachine works like a charm!

However, it seems like enabling any of my jails breaks this. I don't understand how the jails can interfere with the afp service? Also when i select bind to ip in the afp service, I get

Code:

No suitable network config for TCP socket

There is nothing in the log, but i get the "An error occurred" message in the GUI. At least I now got my time machine working and can use my freenas box as a file server. Do miss my plex jail and dokuwiki jail though :/

/B

 

[b88]

Update: I discovered that my ancient macbook had ipv6 support disabled. After enabling this and ipv6 autoconfig on the macbook as well as on freenas, AFP shares are rock solid and time machine has not failed since. Turning on jails does not cause afp instability. Also i turned off binding to ipv4 and ipv6 addresses for the afp service, this got rid on the

Code:

No suitable network config for TCP socket

message.

It seems to me that there could be a warning of some sort if one turns on afp services and ipv6 is not enabled. This would probably help many users struggling with afp and time machine.