AFP connects no longer work on 1.00.05

[drewpuppy]

It looks as though upgrading to 1.00.05 firmware was a mistake for me. The 1.00.04 that the 5200 arrived with was working just fine. Two things have happened on upgrade:
1. The Apple afp protocol no longer works. All connections fail to authenticate.
2. Performance on the cifs protocol has dropped from excellent to very poor.

There's a link on the Thecus site to a copy of the 1.00.04 firmware, but this takes you to a page containing only 1.00.05! Any ideas as to where I can get 1.00.04 from? And will such a downgrade take me back to exactly where I was?

Alternatively I've also downloaded the latest beta firmware. What are the chances that this might solve those problems without the rish of uncovering others?

Many thanks in advance,
Andrew.

[drewpuppy]

Further info:

I found the 1.00.04 firmware with a fairly obvious change the the Thecus download URL, so I have it now.

I can't "upgrade" to it though. When I try the 5200 simply puts an OK button on the screen with no other test explaining what it's doing.

Any ideas?

Andrew.

[omega]

Hi mate,

downgrade will not work

From the first page of the N5200 Firmware v1.00.05 Release Note:

After firmware v1.00.05 installed, the new software doesn't allow users to downgrade to
any firmware version below v1.00.05.

Sorry for that.

Andreas

[drewpuppy]

Thanks for your reply, Andreas. I've been reading your knowledgeable posts here and I was kinda afraid you might come back with something like that.

As the unit is relatively new and I haven't put any data on it yet that isn't also elsewhere I figure that I have two options:
1. Send the unit back and give up (not usually in my nature).
2. Apply the factory reset and rebuild the array from scratch. I wonder if this is likely to gain anything?

I have tried the 1.00.06.5 firmware on the basis that there was little to lose from it. I presume a factory reset will leave this in place.

I'll post more about how I get on later but I'll still welcome any further insights.

Andrew.

[omega]

Andrew,

though downgrading could be done easily, the reason Thecus is not supporting this is most likely that they don't want to test this scenario too.

Although I think that it would be easy to enable the downgrade facility (you only need to patch the 1.00.04 firmware so it identifies itself as 1.00.07 and change the version later manually ) I really don't know if it is wise to tell you that because I do not know what consequences this might bring.

In your situation I'd upgrade to 1.00.06.5 and test again. Post your results here and send it to Thecus. Thecus needs the feedback and as a customer yo deserve support.

If there is a problem with Thecus support and if they don't understand that support is essential for customers, they will loose the competition - very soon. But I assume that they are clever enough not to risk their future like this.....

Sorry that I'm not much help for the Apple afp protocol as I'm not using it.

But please give some details why you think that CIFS performance has dropped. Nobody else yet reported bad performance and I assume you already read the performance numbers others and I posted in another thread.

Andreas

[drewpuppy]

The 1.00.06.5 firmware installed without incident here. The AFP protocol still doesn't work so I've switched everything over to SMB/CIFS. There are no basic reliability issues.

I tried a quick unscientific speed test. This is copying a 5 gig file first from my iMac's internal SATA drive to the 5200 and then back the other way again, watching the network usage as it ran. Both the iMac and the 5200 are connected by CAT-6 to the same gigabit switch and both have jumbo frames enabled. The 5200's 5 drives are all Barracuda 7200.10's and they're set up in a RAID-6 config. The approximate write speeds where about 10MB/sec while reading ran at around 30MB/sec.

Before the "upgrade" read speeds where about the same, so no worries there. However, I seem to remember that write speeds were better. I could be wrong though. What should I expect based on other people's experiences?

Andrew.

[omega]

Andrew,

did you already check this thread: thecususergroup.proboards106.com/index.cgi?board=n5200installations&action=display&thread=1169848822?

[drewpuppy]

Thanks, interesting thread. It lead me to a comment that someone else has also lost AFP on upgrade so it not just me!

Someone from Thecus has been in touch (on their own initiative from reading my posts here, which is great) and asked for diagnostic info.

Meanwhile, I'm at least satisfied that the integrity of my RAID-6 array is intact and stable, so now that I've cooled off a bit I'm prepared to go with the flow.

Cheers,
Andrew.

[drewpuppy]

More info ...

I decided to install the SSH module and dig deeper. First, performance, see the quick and dirty test below:

root@127.0.0.1:/raid/data/scratch# scp andrew@192.168.2.99:fedora.hdd ./
Password:
fedora.hdd 100% 5161MB 8.8MB/s 09:49
root@127.0.0.1:/raid/data/scratch# date;cp fedora.hdd fedora.hdd.1;date
Wed Feb 7 04:39:41 GMT 2007
Wed Feb 7 04:45:22 GMT 2007

The local cp operation resulted in a throughput of 15MB/s, which is much more like the sort of performance I'd expect from the array itself. Clearly the reduced speed for the scp is down to network, protocol and encryption overheads. It's notable that this is about the same speed as a CIFS connection from my iMac.

Second, re AFP, it's clear that Netatalk (http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/) is being used for this. As the service is clearly running on the box when enabled. My pet theory at the moment is that the /etc/netatalk/atalkd.conf file got screwed up by the firmware 1.00.05 installation. I'm awake on a sleepless night right now so that investigation will have to wait until I'm more with it.

Meanwhile, I'm starting to find things like forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-46945.html which make me want to get AFP working again or make me want to have a go at Apple for their poor CIFS implementation (which would likely go on deaf ears).

So, other than the AFP screw up I'm now pretty well convinced that everything is otherwise running "normally".

Andrew.

[Arctra]

drewpuppy said:

More info ...

Second, re AFP, it's clear that Netatalk (http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/) is being used for this. As the service is clearly running on the box when enabled. My pet theory at the moment is that the /etc/netatalk/atalkd.conf file got screwed up by the firmware 1.00.05 installation. I'm awake on a sleepless night right now so that investigation will have to wait until I'm more with it.

Hi Andrew

I am running firmware 1.00.06.5 and the contents of my /etc/netatalk/atalkd.conf file only contains eth0

If you'd like me to send you my config files to see if your are corrupted or anything else I'm happy to send them.

Incidentally, have you taken a look at the unofficial Thecus wiki at all? onbeat.dk/thecus/index.php/N5200_Resources

It has a lot of good info you could use, and it sounds as though you have the technical knowledge to help contribute a bit more to it. At the moment Omega is the most knowledgeable N5200 user and could probably do someone else to help the community out

[drewpuppy]

And yet more info ...

I've now tried the obvious and connected to the 5200 over AFP as "guest" and this worked with a public folder! Connecting to the same public folder as a specific user fails (iMac says user does not exist).

Clearly, authentication is all that is broken on AFP! Should be easy to fix and I'll report back when I have.

Repeating my simple test of copying my large file to the 5200 from the iMac gave a rate of 15.8MB/s, which is around double the CIFS rate. I wasn't going nuts after all.

Andrew.

[drewpuppy]

Thanks Arctra. I'm reading those pages and I'll probably contribute when I'm ready. My day job is time consuming so it'll take a while.

Your file is the same as mine. And I no longer think it's the culprit in this case. There are other files in that directory and I need to read the Netatalk pages before I can figure out which configs drive the authentication. Plan B for now is to unpack the 1.00.04 firmware release and see what it did to set up Netatalk (if anything). I might be able to just revert that one bit back to how it was.

Andrew.

[kevincy]

drewpuppy said:

And yet more info ...

I've now tried the obvious and connected to the 5200 over AFP as "guest" and this worked with a public folder! Connecting to the same public folder as a specific user fails (iMac says user does not exist).

Clearly, authentication is all that is broken on AFP! Should be easy to fix and I'll report back when I have.

Repeating my simple test of copying my large file to the 5200 from the iMac gave a rate of 15.8MB/s, which is around double the CIFS rate. I wasn't going nuts after all.

Andrew.

Hello Andrew,

If you create a new account ,that account whether could log-in?

[drewpuppy]

I tried creating a new user and then a new folder and added the user to the ACL. This still didn't work.
Andrew.

[omega]

Hi Andrew,

you just gave the final hint : there was a change from 1.00.04 to 1.00.05 (and this change is still valid for 1.00.06.5) which affects user authentication.

The problem maker is the file /etc/pam.d/netatalk.

In version 1.00.04 the content is this:

#%PAM-1.0
auth required pam_unix.so
account required pam_unix.so
password required pam_unix.so shadow
session required pam_unix.so

In version 1.00.05 and 1.00.06.5 it has been changed to this:

#%PAM-1.0
auth required pam_winbind.so
account required pam_winbind.so
session required pam_unix.so

But I have no idea why it was changed. Try to use the 1.00.04 version and AFP connects should work like before.

But I'm still interested in why this setting was changed.....

Andreas