No permission to copy file (to NAS with AFP support) - extended attributes?

For certain files that I copy from one of my drives to the NAS here (Synology 206j), ever since upgrading to Snow Leopard, Finder's behaviour has changed. It will simply refuse to copy the file, stating that "The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access some of the items."

The source is an external USB drive in Mac OS Extended format, I do have full permissions on the files and in any case the drive is set to ignore ownership.

The target is, like most NASes, in EXT3 format. It's sharing via its own AFP implementation.

I'd have tried repairing permissions, but for whatever reason, it's greyed out on my external drives. Since then I've figured that it was probably not that anyway, which will become apparent:

I tried copying the file via the terminal and it actually worked, but also gave an error: "cp: myfile: could not copy extended attributes to /Volumes/media backup/myfile: Operation not permitted"

This suggests to me that, as expected, the target volume doesn't support extended attributes. But rather than popping up with the message that Leopard did (something along the lines of "your target volume doesn't support extended attributes so your file's metadata may be lost, do you wish to continue") it just aborts instead.

I'm not sure if this is a Snow Leopard problem or a change that Synology need to catch up with. A workaround is to compress the file to ZIP first.

Thought I'd mention it here before trying to report it as a bug somewhere. Anyone else having similar issues, either with a NAS or some other storage, in which case please specify?

Message was edited by: Cloudane

iMac 20" 2.4, Mac OS X (10.6)

Posted on Aug 29, 2009 4:40 PM

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11 replies

Aug 31, 2009 8:14 AM in response to Cloudane

I've been in contact with the Netatalk developers. Their initial evaluation is Extended Attributes - Snow Leopard uses and wants them; Netatalk doesn't support them (yet).

It sounds like the code has been written to add EA to Netatalk, but it hasn't been finalized or released. Even when it is released, it will probably take awhile for Netgear and Synology to adopt the new code. The faster fix would be something from Apple in a system update, but that might be wishful thinking.

Aug 31, 2009 9:34 AM in response to Cloudane

Thanks guys, yeah I've been monitoring the netatalk mailing list myself: they're onto the same problem, have come to the same conclusions about it being Extended Attributes and have much better proof of such than I 🙂

It looks like they're currently debating the best way to fix it (pretending to support EAs but sending them to a black hole being the quick and dirty way, but I suspect they'll go for implementation)

It'll be a while for sure, but the Synology guys are very good with Mac support so I'm sure they'll apply the update fairly quickly once the netatalk crew get something public. FWIW, I did detect a certain sense of urgency from the netatalk discussions.

Although it's essentially answered, I'll leave the question marked as unanswered in case Apple come up with a better one 🙂

Message was edited by: Cloudane

Aug 31, 2009 10:49 AM in response to Cloudane

Same here, though with SMB Shares.

SoHo-NAS LCS-8311 (aka Allnet 6250 aka several others), running samba 3.0.6, copying from NAS results in truncated files and "unknown error - 8084" when copying with finder and no error message and return status 0 but broken files as well when copying with cp.

Also some issues with NFS on the same NAS. Downgrading and installing SL to external drive, for testing purposes.

Oct 9, 2009 6:37 AM in response to D4T3N7OD

Gotta love Apple. They know that there are third-party devices out there that use Netatalk to interface with their AFP network file protocol, but yet they release a modified version of AFP without notifying the Netatalk team or the manufacturers of major NAS devices (like Infrant/Netgear).

I guess getting big and getting arrogant goes hand in hand.

Feb 1, 2010 2:51 AM in response to halexmol

I changed it on the NAS! Which in my case is a Buffalo Linkstation Pro with Debian.
With this setup I can ssh into the NAS and change the config file '/etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default' with an editor.

If you don't have direct access to the nas config files for netatalk you're out of luck.
Even if you have, you should know how to get to the nas by ssh or telnet, cd to /etc/netatalk/ and
vi or jot the AppleVolumes.default file.

If you don't know how to do this, please wait for a firmware-update of your nas vendor.

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No permission to copy file (to NAS with AFP support) - extended attributes?

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