Time Machine share doesn't seem to work on MacOS Mojave

[curtii]

Hello, and thanks in advance for any help.

Here's my specs:
I have two different machines I'm using to try to connect:
2018 Macbook pro running MacOS Mojave (10.14)
2017 iMac running MacOS Sierra (10.12)

Self-built Freenas system:
Motherboard: Supermicro X10SRi-F
Processor: Xeon E5-1620 v3
Memory: 1x 32gb Hynix HMA84GR7MFR4N-UH
Power supply: Seasonic G-Series 650w
Drives (Configured as RAID10): 4x 4TB HGST Ultrastar 7K4000

EDIT: Realized that I forgot FreeNAS version, which is probably relevant: Just upgraded to FreeNAS-11.1-U6 (before getting started setting up Time Machine share)

I've followed both the official documentation's guide to using the wizard: https://doc.freenas.org/11/sharing.html
As well as an unofficial guide for manual setup (that look to produce the same end result) here: http://bytesandbolts.com/how-to-configure-freenas-9-3-for-time-machine-with-disk-quotas/

With either, I get the same problematic result.
For the Macbook on Mojave 10.14: Time Machine sees the volume available, but on trying to connect I get the error shown in the attached screenshot - Time Machine can't connect to the backup disk. The operation couldn't be completed. (OSStatus error 2.).
For the iMac on Sierra 10.12: It doesn't give any kind of error, it just fails to connect and goes back to the screen where you can select a backup disk, not having connected or changed anything

I also confirmed correct credentials by intentionally trying incorrect credentials - That gives the usual "wiggle" that OSX windows do when you've typed in the wrong password.

I also tried manually connecting to the AFP share, which generally works on a regular time capsule (You just end up seeing the .sparsebundle backup images when you do that, but it's not a bad way to test connectivity to a time capsule). I'm unable to do that, getting either an error that the share doesn't exist, or your user account doesn't have permissions.

Thanks again in advance for any advice!

 

[Kevin Horton]

Time Machine works for our household, on three Macs on Mojave, to a server running FN 11.1-U6. So there doesn't seem to be a basic incompatibility.

I have had the occasional issue in the past that was always resolved by turning the AFP service OFF/ON on FN, or by manually connecting to the Time Machine share (in the Finder => Go => Connect to Server ... => afp://FreeNAS_IP_Address/Time_Machine_Share_name. But we haven't had to resort to either of those "fixes" since the update to Mojave.

 

[curtii]

Damn near lost my mind trying to figure this out, but it looks like I finally found it.

/mnt/zfspoolname/timecapsule directory had the correct permissions, but /mnt/zfspoolname had 770. I changed that to 775 (non-recursive), and now I can mount the AFP share.

Edit: Did a bit further testing - For anyone who comes across this later, and wants the most restrictive permissions, I actually didn't need the read access. 771 was sufficient for the parent directories, but it does look like that's needed for every directory all the way up the folder structure.

Thanks for your assistance Kevin :)

 

[Dollar Bill]

Damn near lost my mind trying to figure this out, but it looks like I finally found it.

/mnt/zfspoolname/timecapsule directory had the correct permissions, but /mnt/zfspoolname had 770. I changed that to 775 (non-recursive), and now I can mount the AFP share.

Edit: Did a bit further testing - For anyone who comes across this later, and wants the most restrictive permissions, I actually didn't need the read access. 771 was sufficient for the parent directories, but it does look like that's needed for every directory all the way up the folder structure.

Thanks for your assistance Kevin :)

Why are you using AFP? I was under the impression this doesn't even work with APFS anymore.

 

[curtii]

Why are you using AFP? I was under the impression this doesn't even work with APFS any more.

As far as I've found, AFP is the only share type that the Time Machine software will recognize. I'd be all for a newer/better supported alternative if there is one, I just haven't seen it yet.

 

[Dollar Bill]

As far as I've found, AFP is the only share type that the Time Machine software will recognize. I'd be all for a newer/better supported alternative if there is one, I just haven't seen it yet.

This is false. I currently have TM running with SMB share and I am pretty sure that is the recommended approach as AFP has been deprecated. You may be able to back up for now but I suspect you will run into issues trying to restore. If not now then in the near future. Here are some sources you can look at pertaining to this.

https://redmine.ixsystems.com/issues/23359
https://apple.stackexchange.com/que...d-to-be-removed-from-future-versions-of-macos

 

[curtii]

Thanks for the heads up, Dollar Bill. I just got my stuff reconfigured to use SMB instead of AFP. This wasn't immediately obvious just by searching - There's a lot of noise in search results either indicating that you should use AFP (older threads), or threads indicating that SMB is in the pipeline but not ready yet. For anyone who comes across this, here's what I found which explains how to do this: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/smb-share-macos-timemachine.64440/#post-493216

In particular, this part:

The patches to support time machine over SMB should already be in 11.1-U6. What needs to happen is:

1) Enable vfs_fruit on all SMB shares
2) set the parameter "fruit:time machine = yes" as an auxiliary parameter for the SMB share.
3) restart the SMB service via the UI