SMB vs. APF
DEFINITIONS
AEBS – AirPort Extreme Base Station
AFP – Apple Filing Protocol
APX – AirPort Express
HDD – Hard Disk Drive
MBA – MacBook Air
SMB – Samba
HALLELUJAH! Thank God for the Apple Discussion forums. After 3.5 hours on the phone to Apple Technical Support, trolling through the online discussion forums has led me to the discovery of SMB vs. AFP connectivity issues.
After two weeks of trying to iron out the not-to-impressive wireless network, I had resigned to the fact that everytime I woke my MBA from sleep, I have a 70/30 percent chance of losing connectivity with my external HDD that is connected to my newly purchased AEBS.
Error message after waking computer from sleep
Even taking the advise of a “product specialist” – to format my external hard drive to HFS+ (Mac OS Extended [Journaled]), AND making sure the Partitioned Map Scheme was GUID (I had it on Master Boot – which is better for Mac/Windows file sharing), selecting the external HDD to “mount” at start up/login (through System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items) and then resetting the whole system to balance out the various products (MBA, AEBS, external HDD and APX) – it did not guarantee the external HDD to be located under “Shared Devices” in the Finder window.
The product specialist did touch on a fact that my NETGEAR wireless modem could be dynamically reassigning a new IP address to AirPort whenever I woke the MBA from sleep – hence the AEBS not being able to “follow” the ever-changing IP address. One work-around was to assign a static IP address. But that would mean configuring the NETGEAR wireless modem router and a bunch of other things, to which Apple could not help me with.
So, the solution? Waking up my computer from sleep many times until I can see my external HDD under the “Shared Devices”. This involved waking, login out, login in, rebooting, resetting….and a combination of all those.
BUT oh, what a discovery! It is 1:22am and after reading a thread about connectivity issues relating to external HDD with AEBS, here is the revelation:
Some users did not have problems with the Airdisk, other users report major problems, like lost connection after Macbook sleep. Why did some user reports this major problems and other say everything is fine: I think that’s because they use different filesystems on their Airdisk and therefore they use SMB OR AFP as connection protocol. I assume that user with Fat32 formated USB-disk did not have the same problems because the use SMB to connect to their disk. My disk is HFS+ formated and so Leopard (10.5.1) uses per default the AFP to connect. I have major problems especially after my Macbook wakes up from sleep modus, then I get the “connection lost” error and I am not able to reconnect to the Disk again. I have to reconnect the usb cable to the AEBS or restart the station. But I find out, that the SMB connection to the disk works fine, even if the AFP corrupts after the sleep modus
Solution – (Go > Connect to server > smb://IP-ADDRESS/….. ).
Now comes a time of testing this SMB connection out. I have added both SMB and AFP to be connected to the server, and when I wake this computer from sleep in the morning, I will do some more vigorous testing (waking from sleep, login out/in, rebooting). My bet is that the AFP will be corrupted and that the SMB will still have a strong and stable connection.
Wish me luck!
5 Comments
Ok. It didn’t work. BUT I have isolated the problem. It has to do with my NETGEAR wireless modem router. EVEN though I have disabled it from doing any routering and leave that up to the AirPort Extreme Base Station, it STILL assigns 1 out of 3 IP address. And two of those IP address actually work with the AEBS and my external HDD. So I am forever sleeping/waking my MBA inorder to get back on that particular IP address! Frustratingly annoying, but at least its a work-around solution.
Hi
A couple of things:
1. When you lose connection to an SMB disk, it doesn’t reconnect properly – AFP seems to reconnect better – this is from experience.
2. Looks like you have dynamic IPs being sent out by the DHCP server, and getting IP conflicts when different IPs are being mapped – 2 solutions – set the IP to stick to the devices, or change to manual static IPs ie. switch off the DHCP server.
Hope that helps.
Erwin from MacTalk,
Hi Erwin!
I tried manually setting an IP address through my NETGEAR router and through AEBS to no avail
I switched off DHCP and set it to manual and although it worked for one day, the moment I woke up the computer, it connected to that IP address, but the internet and anything else connected to the server did not work. So I had to quickly reinstate DHCP on my AEBS and it’s back to the square 1.
So my question is, how does one set an IP to the devices? I so need a computer geeky friend who’s into Macs to help me out here. Apple Support just gave out the generic answer that because my wireless router is not made from Apple, they could not help me out.
Which is fair enough, but it sucks that I have to constantly wake/sleep my Mac inorder to get it back to the correct IP that will allow everything to work seemlessly…AS IT SHOULD!
IP addresses have to be approached as a whole network issue – if you switch off DHCP, then you have to manually set your internal home LAN IP address for all your devices – router, modem, computers etc. And also manually set the router and DNS IPs as well on your devices. It can be a hassle. A lot of routers allow DHCP to give out IPs, and then in your router, there should be an option to give these IP’s a life period – I personally set mine to “stick” forever – so they become static IPs, even though they were initially dynamically given out. I did this so that my Macbook and iPhones can go to other networks and be connected automatically, rather than having to switch them from manual to DHCP.
Thank you for your help. I thought I did set an IP address to all my devices, but it didn’t quite work out. I’m unsure if I have configured the modem correctly for that to happen, but am unsure if there was an option to let it “stick” forever. I do recall waking up my MBA and AirPort did connect to the set IP address I had given it, BUT I could not access the internet. So somethings still not right! *sigh*
This issue will become the death of me. If I can’t configure this on my own, I will either need to buy a normal DSL modem. I am moving house in a year’s time, and there will be cable internet. No more home lines. I am hoping that will fix up all the problems I have been having based on my trusty NETGEAR wireless modem/router and my ISP dynamic IP address!