AFS share browsing not working from some Macs

[Matt Pounsett]

I have a home network with three Macs on it: an old Mac Pro, an iMac, and a Macbook Pro. All are running the same version of MacOS (10.10.5).
I have a FreeNAS 9.3 server with AFS shares set up for Time Machine.
The Mac Pro and iMac are on the same wired network as the FreeNAS host. The Macbook is hanging off a wireless AP on the same 'net.

The Mac Pro works fine, no problems.
The iMac and the Macbook are unable to see the FreeNAS server in their share browsers, which means that the Time Machine configuration can't see the Time Machine shares to set that up. On both these hosts, I can directly connect to the FreeNAS server from the Finder's Go->Connect to Server menu option. Once I've forced that connection, then the Time Machine configuration can see and back up to the correct share... but I have to manually connect first, which means that automatic backups are going to fail.

I've confirmed the firewalls on both problem hosts are disabled .. although I don't think that should be a problem here anyway.

Any ideas of what other things I should look into to troubleshoot this? I'm at a loss here. Googling this issue has only found me a few references to a potential bug in the FreeNAS 9.2 release candidate, but that was ages ago and presumably fixed by now (and also should affect all my hosts equally).

 

[bernieTB]

Hi Matt,

I had a similar issue where the Freenas host would show up but when I tried to connect, I would get an error - I know it's not similar to what you are experiencing but you may want to check if you have the CIFS service enabled. If you do, I found that the 'Zeroconf share discovery' under the CIFS configuration was conflicting with AFP - I switched that off and I can now see my shares showing up as they are supposed to, without having to use 'Connect to server'.

Again, this may not be the cause of your issue but it doesn't harm to check...

 

[Matt Pounsett]

Eventually a reboot of my FreeNAS box fixed the issue. I still have no idea what was causing it, though... or why the issue would have only affected some hosts, not all.