Unraid and sharing with Macs and MacOS

Does anyone here have much success using Macs to connect with an UnRaid file server? I have been trying (for years now) to get shares (SMB or AFP) to mount with my Macs and it never works well. The first attempt to connect to the SMB share often fails completly and often kills any FTP file transfers I am doing at the time. If it does eventually connect, it often just stops working and then drops.

The seemingly relevant logs might be this, but there is nothing else.

Jan 10 09:20:42 VVData avahi-daemon[3680]: Service "VVData-AFP" (/services/afp.service) successfully established.

Jan 10 09:23:31 VVData afpd[6127]: dsi_stream_read: len:0, unexpected EOF

Jan 10 09:24:55 VVData afpd[6482]: transmit: Request to dbd daemon (volume TimeMachines) timed out.

Jan 10 09:24:55 VVData afpd[6482]: afp_openvol(/mnt/user/TimeMachines): Fatal error: Unable to get stamp value from CNID backend

Jan 10 09:26:14 VVData afpd[6482]: transmit: Request to dbd daemon (volume Time Machine Backups) timed out.

Jan 10 09:26:14 VVData afpd[6482]: afp_openvol(/mnt/user/Time Machine Backups): Fatal error: Unable to get stamp value from CNID backend

I am wondering which shares I should be using of if I should be formatting the drives to something other than XFS.

My current system specs are:

Model: N/A

M/B: Supermicro - X8SIL

CPU: Intel® Core™ i3 CPU 550 @ 3.20GHz

HVM: Enabled

IOMMU: Disabled

Cache: 128 kB, 512 kB, 4096 kB

Memory: 4 GB (max. installable capacity 16 GB)

Network: eth0: 1000 Mb/s, full duplex, mtu 1500

eth1: 1000 Mb/s, full duplex, mtu 1500

Kernel: Linux 4.4.30-unRAID x86_64

OpenSSL: 1.0.2j

Uptime: 0 days, 00:35:45

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Update: My drives are formatted with reiserfs.

I've been using unRAID with Macs for years. I was never able to get AFP to work reliably when I first tried (back in the version 4 days), so I just always stuck with SMB for transfers and I've never had an issue with connecting or usage. Every now and then I try to set up a TimeMachine share but that always seems to bomb out on me as well, so I don't do it.

You may want to try disabling AFP and sticking with SMB. The only recent change I've encountered with Mac OS is I can no longer connect with "smb://unraidaddress" but instead must use "cifs://unraidaddress". How are you attempting to mount the drives? Truth be told I've never messed with FTP transfers to my server, so I have no clue about that.

10 out of my 14 drives are RFS, but I am currently in process of converting over to XFS. I doubt the drive format has anything to do with your issues, since you're connecting via a network protocol anyway.

Hey, thanks for your reply! I actually DID give up on AFP and started using SMB, but that started getting flaky and I about burst yesterday when I tried to save my Word, single page, document to the unRaid server (over SMB)mand it refused to connect twice and killed other FTP connections as well, so I started looking into AFP, but it sounds like that is worse.

I am copying (via FTP) four files at a time and that will be going on consistently for a while as I am restoring data. Our files are usually over 50GB, so it will take a while. I feel like that should cause these connection issues, but it may be just that - too many connections at one time.

Here is my diagnostics file if it will help any.

vvdata-diagnostics-20170110-1152.zip

ReiserFS does not handle filled disk well at all, it gets really slow. The writes are probably timing out.

Edit: Saw the diagnostics. Time outs and filled disks...

So formatting each drive would be the best course of action?

Edit: Thanks for that very helpful piece of information!

Not formatting, per se, but converting.

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=37490.0

That should do it. Granted, I did not look for other potential problems in the diagnostics, but ReiserFS and timeouts are old buddies of mine 

My switch from ReiserFS to XFS was time consuming but painless as I did it while adding a new disk.

1. Pre-cleared my new disk

2. Added the new disk to the array and let unRAID format it

3. Copied all files from one ReiserFS disk to the empty XFS disk

4. Verified checksums of all written files

5. Changed file system of the ReiserFS disk and let unRAID format it

6. GOTO 3.

I have no problem using AFP with old (10.6.8, Snow Leopard) and new (10.12.2, Sierra) versions of Mac OS X. Sierra also works well with the flavour of SMB provided with unRAID 6.3.0-rc6, but not so well with earlier versions. Snow Leopard doesn't work well with SMB at all.

However, using unRAID as a Time Machine destination is a different matter. In fact using any NAS as a Time Machine destination is problematic, including Apple's own products, so it isn't really an unRAID problem.

See this thread for more information and for a tip that made AFP much more reliable for me: https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=55369.0

Thank you all for you replies and suggestions!