Andrew LaGow

Q: Network volumes dropping, Finder hangs

This problem is reproducible on two of my machines so far.

 

The setup:

  1. Mount a network volume (in this case Synology NAS DSM 6.0.2-8451 Update 1)
  2. From within an application (in my case Pages, but this has happened in Word as well), save a document to the volume

The result:

  • The document doesn't save
  • The network volume unmounts
  • Finder hangs, relaunching is no help
  • The application from which I save also hangs and not even Activity monitor or a Terminal process kill will stop the process from running

I thought this might be related to Adobe Creative Cloud, Dropbox or Default Folder, but I can reproduce this problem with all of those apps not running. I'm now more convinced than ever that this is a Sierra networking bug, but am wondering if anyone else has had this issue, and if so, were you able to solve it?

 

Thanks so much.

Posted on Sep 27, 2016 10:48 AM

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Q: Network volumes dropping, Finder hangs

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  • by Andrew LaGow,Solvedanswer

    Andrew LaGow Andrew LaGow Sep 27, 2016 2:52 PM in response to Andrew LaGow
    Level 1 (149 points)
    Mac OS X
    Sep 27, 2016 2:52 PM in response to Andrew LaGow

    Just in case anyone comes here first like I did, a visit to the Synology forums confirms that there is a bug in the implementation of AFP on Synology drives—and possibly other NAS drives not made by Synology. Apparently Apple changed the protocol enough that saving files onto a network volume will crash Finder and hang the application attempting the save.

     

    The solution is to mount any network volume via SMB. So instead of cmd-K and typing  afp://your-volume-name you'd do smb://your-volume-name. Pretty simple and it seems to work around the problem.