Anybody had any success getting it to work?
I just get “the network backup disk does not support the required afp features” over and over. Seems that the firmware would need to be updated to support 10.7.
And given the fact that 10.7 should be coming soon (summer), unless Drobo wants lots of unhappy customers that upgraded and cannot restore migrate their backups (or cannot continue backing up their systems), they should look into it right away.
Yeah my Drobo doesn’t even show up in the Finder sidebar under 10.7
Apple OS prereleases are traditionally rife with bugs, this may be an apple problem.
Given that the error message is “does not support the required afp features”, it sounds like Apple has either changed the AFP protocol or Time Machine now uses more features of it. If you really want to investigate, I’d look on the netatalkd lists to see if they’re working on it - netatalkd is the open source software that the Drobo and other Linux-based NAS devices use to support AFP.
^ This. If Apple “broke” netatalk, then not only the FS, but every single “Apple-compatible” device out there based on Linux will break as well.
Then again, it is their protocol. The fact that netatalkd reverse engineered it isn’t really their concern. Just like Microsoft doesn’t consult the samba project if they want to tweak SMB/CIFS.
If there were indeed protocol changes that netatalkd needs to take into account, then I expect they will do so. How long it takes for that code to be finalized and then get rolled into a DroboFS update is anyone’s guess. I suppose the more it breaks, the faster the update will be.
Thus “broke” in quotes. My point was that if this is really happening, then the pressure to get it fixed will not only come from Drobo users, but also from every single Linux-based NAS which relies on netatalk for Mac support (which is pretty much all of them).
Of course, this only means that the pressure to fix netatalk will be huge, not that the fix will be pushed to all these devices. In particular, we can only guess whether or not DRI will push a fix for it. I’m quite optimistic about it, since Mac compatibility is a big selling point for Drobos.
According to some post, the nettatalkd build is not a complete AFP implementation, lacking some stuff.
That’s probably why Lion still works with Time Machines that are 2+ years old.
“Apple discontinuing support for DHCAST128 (or DHX) authentication in Lion because it was considered insecure. Instead, the successor of DHCAST128 should be used: the more secure DHX2 user authentication module. DHX2 is supported since Mac OS X 10.2 and supports up to 256 characters for passwords (hell yeah, that should be enough). It relies on CAST-128 in cipher block chaining mode for encryption.”
Rumor has it that some NAS vendors intentionally disable DHX2 in netatalk because it’s a lot more CPU intensive.
Apparently netatalk 2.1.2 supports the DHX2 UAM. What version is Drobo running?
There appears to be a public spec for what is required by a server to provide Time Machine support over a network - Time Machine Network Interface Specification (TMNIS):
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/NetworkingInternetWeb/Conceptual/TimeMachineNetworkInterfaceSpecification/[hr]
The problems seems to be with Time Machine, since I am able to connect to the Drobo using AFP without problems.
2.0.5, according to “/bin/netatalk-config --version”.
Yeah, but it is netatalk that also provides the TimeMachine support on the Drobo side. Maybe there is an option missing on the netatalk configuration file?
The generated config can be found at: /mnt/DroboFS/System/netatalk/conf/AppleVolumes.default