Catalina ends support for NAS...anybody going to miss it?

[Michael Tiemann]

I've been following a discussion on the Apple forums about Catalina's unreliable behavior concerning NAS devices. There are many people complaining. I just saw this post, which basically says:

At first they appeared willing to help: a support engineer did a remote connect to my MacBook, we did a screen recording and a dump of the network traffic when recreating the connection problems with my NAS. It then remained quiet. After sending a reminder to Apple I got the anwser that 1) Apple does not support NAS and 2) I should contact the manufacturer of my NAS.

Now, the user who posted in Dutch, and the Apple support ticket he points to is in Dutch, so there may be a bit of a language translation problem. But the fact remains: Catalina has broken NAS connections that have been stable since OSX Lion, and Apple seems far more intent on promoting DAS (direct attach storage) than anything else. And it seems to be the case for many other users all over the world, with absolutely nothing coming back from Apple.

Would you be inconvenienced at all if Apple were to say "SMB and AFP? RIP!" Do you have enough sway with Apple to get them to address this issue in a more serious fashion?

I've already paused my plans to get a Mac Pro 2019 for other reasons, but it looks like its time to really migrate away from the whole platform.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Apple is not ending support for SMB and AFP or network file sharing, NAS, etc... Well, they are on their server end of things. It looks like Mac OS Server is going to finally be put to pasture, as Apple has seemingly wanted to do for some time now.

NAS compliance with other servers like FreeNAS, QNAP, Synology, etc.. all still work just fine under the latest Catalina release and betas.

If Apple were to remove support for common network protocols like SMB, etc.. they wouldn’t just have an unhappy customer base, they would have class action law suits and other more serious things to deal with.

Apple is not pushing a lot for DAS or large external or even localized storage. They want people on the cloud. And seem to be oblivious that the cloud doesn’t help people who have to move many GB, or TB of data in a single day. And as soon as you’re paying someone else for your daily bulk storage, you’ve already made a poor decision, IMO.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I should also say that Apple trying to kill OSX Server is still speculation by some. There is no outward sign of that and they are promoting the Mac Pro, in particular the rack mount configuration, for use as a server. Also promoting internal bulk / RAID storage solutions from Promise specifically and a couple others about to join the market with both HDD and SSD options.

OSX Catalina has direct support for 25G, 40G, 100G (and now it seems 400G too) network adapters from Intel, Mellanox and a couple others. Which are all new additions now that the new Mac Pro has PCIe slots again.

...Which brings me to the question of Catalina breaking NAS connections/ support. Only report I’ve seen is some glitchiness with OSX Server, hence the speculation it might be on its way out.

[Blair S. Paulsen]

I do think Apple is seeing the big data future and Jeff's notes only reinforce that. I concur that Apple, like pretty much everyone else in the space, are promoting cloud based solutions so they can create durable revenue streams. I'd further suggest that Apple is motivated to support current and emerging standards to allow easy integration in multi platform workgroups lest they lose sales.

Cheers - #19

[andrewhake]

Issue with whatever NAS is being used not macOS.

[Michael Tiemann]

Issue with whatever NAS is being used not macOS.

Scores of users would disagree.

[Stephen Mickelsen]

Just one data point, but the only issue I had when setting up Catalina/MacPro 2019 with Synology NAS boxes, was that Bonjour broadcast under SMB was not on by default on the Synology devices. Once I turned that on, operation has been great.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Scores of users would disagree.

Read through that... 99.9% of all their issues could be eliminated by running fixed IPs and proper name server for NetBIOS/ Bonjour name management so they don't get ghosts and echos if IPs change or ports don't clear. Some are having issues when upgrading to Catalina. Understandable, had some issues like that here too. Catalina has a completely reworked network stack and differing support files. They're fighting old data from their prior OS X and need to purge all that. But honestly not worth the brain damage, wipe and clean install would be the better course because there are lots of changes throughout the OS. Sure, there are the usual "sky is falling" people who think this spells doom for NAS connections on Mac OS. ...Whatever. If Apple were eliminating AFP, SMB, etc.. protocol support, then why did they recently add them to iPad OS and continue to add features for servers and NAS with each update?

Of the discussion link you posted, the issues with NAS shares not showing on the sidebar in Finder is not new to Catalina. Just go manually add them (drag your share or desired folder to the sidebar) and then they pop up every time that server share connects. I connect all my NAS shares via the login items and on some I have to specify an alias or automator script instead of directly linking the share address. That's so I can set a delay because some will time out if they have to wait for WOL or other such things. I keep my QNAP so it does not sleep, saves a lot of headaches on both Mac and Windows. The drives will spin down, bun none of that WOL nonsense.

[PatrickFaith]

I have had a bunch of problems on apple/windows NAS. I think a bit of it is also both sides adding security layers that seem to be messing something up. I have also found it hard to do clean re-image things on my mac, I have this one laptop (macbook pro) that I can't for some reason download catalina for (it says it should work but doesn't), and it's not obvious to me where to get older os images at apple. I have to support a bunch of boxes so re-imaging things when there is some incompatibility is death, especially with certain plugins stop working on various images. What I really liked about nas is i wasn't dealing with being a fully time network/version/os guy - seems recently I have got in admin land which is horrible for my productivity. Lately I have just been cutting over to everything being amd-CPU/windows.

[Michael Tiemann]

I'm with Patrick: administration should not be this hard!

My current puzzler: I have two QNAP systems both connected to my 10G network. My iMacPro connects to both no problem. My MacBook Pro will connect to whichever I attempt to connect to first (A or B), but will not connect to the other (B or A). This behavior is the same whether I try to connect to smb://IP.V4.ADDRESS/ or use the Network browser and connect to what it sees courtesy of Bonjour. From the QNAP side, both NAS units are reporting successful authentication attempts. I.e., if I'm starting out fresh (no recent servers, no NAS units mounted, fresh relaunch of Finder) and I attempt to connect to the B unit, it succeeds (and the B unit logs a successful attempt to authenticate and access that device). If I then try to connect to A in essentially the same way, the operation fails (silently if I go via Command-K and use the IP address and SMD protocol), or "The Operation Failed" if I try to go via the Finder's network browser. In both cases, the A unit reports that a successful authentication was received. Ditto if I start with A and then try to add B.

I've been a Unix admin since 1985 and know how to search for answers that are not obvious. Catalina has me completely stumped, and most of my searches into the problem all have a common thread: Apple has deprecated AFP, NFS, and doesn't appear to like SMB very much either. But they especially don't support 3rd-party NAS devices.