need help to create AFP shares for Mac users for noob at FreeNAS, please help!

[jonathan777]

I have been playing around with FreeNAS at work for sometime, and I just can't seem to fathom how to create shares that can be accessed by a Mac.

I'm a Windows guy, but found installing FreeNAS simple, set IP address and build a mirrored set of disks in RAID-5 was simple.

I have been studying the documentation and searching for answers,

At work:-
Pentium 4 2.8 box, 1Gb with 3x 250Gb drives in RAID-5
FreeNAS 8.3.0 on 4Gb stick
share made using AFP

mostly imac 2006 and 2008 models, I think they running OS X 10.5 but I know they are quite old now.

using the logins I have created I cannot mount the share. I admit I don't have much background with Macs. The passwords are definitely correct. The Macs are not on a domain, although we have our Windows boxes on a domain. The Macs have fixed IP addresses, as if they are dynamic they keep changing and it messes up our Spiceworks IT management system.

At home:-
Windows 7 laptop running Virtualbox
FreeNAS 8.3.0. running under virtualbox with 1Gb memory, 2Gb boot, and 8Gb data, all configured ok as far as I can see.
I have a Hackintosh running under Virualbox running OS X 10.5 which works fine, but can't read shares.

The shares seem all correct, I don't know if I need to make groups, use the 'default' ones like wheel, www, etc?
If I create a guest account in both cases, I can see the disk but its read only it seems??


If can get this running reliably and demonstrate to the bosses, I'm looking to build 2 boxes each with about 6Tb of storage each.

I am sysadmin for a charity in Israel

any help appreciated!

 

[fracai]

Check that you're using the appropriate user name. I had a share set up with access granted to "user" (same user name existing on FreeNAS and OS X), but the Mac kept trying to use the full name; i.e. "User Name". If I forced this to the short name, things were fine.

Also, once you have your shares set up, try restarting the AFP service. Before I did this, I kept getting errors on the FreeNAS side that multiple shares had the same name, after the restart things were fine.

And finally, can you check your logs on the FreeNAS side and on the Mac for any errors related to the AFP share. Things like bad password or a sudden disconnect.

 

[WinstonSmith]

Hi,
can you please be a bit more specific about the following?

If I forced this to the short name, things were fine.

Thanks a lot,
Sascha

 

[fracai]

Here's an example using your name for illustration.

Typically when you create a user account, there is a short name (wsmith) and a long name (Winston Smith). SSH and other logins typically require the short name (ssh wsmith@192.168.1.42) and this is also displayed when you list file permissions. The long name is usually only used when displaying a GUI login (the short name is used behind the scenes).

When I was setting up my TimeMachine share, I first mounted the share in the GUI and then selected the volume from the TimeMachine Preference Pane. The initial backup completed properly, but then I started getting errors that the volume couldn't be found. Looking through the logs showed that TimeMachine was trying to mount the share as "afp://Winston%20Smith@192.168.1.42/TimeMachine". Of course, my FreeNAS box only had a 'wsmith' account and didn't respond to the long name. Again using the 'tmutil' tool, I set the backup volume to "afp://wsmith@192.168.1.42/TimeMachine" and my backups have been fine since.

So somewhere along the lines, the Mac stored the full name instead of the short name when trying to connect. I suppose this may purely be a TimeMachine issue; maybe when you mount the share as a normal user the system tries both names or understands the mapping from long name to short name.

Regardless, I updated my share bookmarks to specifically use the short name. Previously, my share bookmarks just looked like: "afp://192.168.1.42/share", now they look like "afp://wsmith@192.168.1.42/share".

And you can easily create a bookmark on the Mac by typing out the address in any text document, highlight the text, and drag it to the desktop.

That and restarting the AFP service solved things for me anyway.

 

[WinstonSmith]

Thank you very much for your fast and detailed reply.

What I was looking for in detail was this

now they look like "afp://wsmith@192.168.1.42/share".

Kind regards,
Sascha