SMB Disk share does not work on airport extreme (Simultaneous Dual-Band II)

I've just got a brand new airport extreme (Simultaneous Dual-Band II). I bought it for the fast N network and for the NAS functionality provided by the device.

I have connected a HFS+ formatted USB disk and it works flawlessly with Macs on the network using AFP file sharing. However, SMB/CIFS filesharing is really poor. It work for about 10 minutes after a reboot of the airport express. After this it is no longer possible to mount the disk over SMB - neither from win7 boxes or from Macs using the smb:// mount option. Any SMB connected drives will also disconnect from the Macs at this point. AFP connected drives still functions without any problems.

This is extremely annoying since I would very much like to access the drive using the SMB protocol, not only from windows machines but also from other devices (which naturally don't use AFP).

Does anybody else have SMB working on the new late 2009 airport extreme (Simultaneous Dual-Band II)? The unit runs firmware version 7.5 and there don't seem to be a downgrade path for this particular device.

Any ideas on getting this to work? Otherwise it is mostly useless as a general NAS solution...

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.2)

Posted on Dec 22, 2009 10:15 AM

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6 replies

Jan 5, 2010 9:57 AM in response to Allan Hansen

I have this problem as well. Specifically SMB remotely from WAN. Works after a restart of time capsule dual band but only accepts SMB for about 10 minutes. AFP works fine.

I called apple support via applecare and they said they could not help with the problem. He recommended factory defaults and test from there. Has anyone tried that?

Perhaps this is a firmware bug?

I tried the file path mentioned by dpkingston and it did not work.

Any ideas welcomed.

Jon

Jan 9, 2010 5:49 AM in response to DJ Flyte

I have a FTP srv running Windows on WAN with some hard drives shared. I just do CMD+K on my mbp and then smb://localip and it works. Only problem is that because the new AEBS has some slowdowns I have to buffer the movies I stream (issue only on 5 GHz band).

I don't know if this helps...

Edit: Oh and do a feedback to Apple about the issue at: http://www.apple.com/feedback/airportextreme.html

Message was edited by: metalic

Jan 25, 2010 1:08 PM in response to Allan Hansen

I'm not quite sure just what is happening with your problem. I have got a brand new Airport Extreme dual band running 5gh and 2.4gh with a WD 500gb mybook attached by usb. My imac is using the 5g network as is my win7 laptop and xbox360("N" wireless adapter) also I have a Win XP netbook using 2.4gh network. They all seem to be working perfectly. They can all see mybook and use internet. Technically I don't know why, they just do, also technically I don't know why yours isn't. But if there's any settings you need to know tell me and I can look at my settings then you can compare

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SMB Disk share does not work on airport extreme (Simultaneous Dual-Band II)

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