NAS Access in Catalina issues

@bsanders44, @bruno_l, @Cemento, @Datajack,

Thanks for the additional hint. I hadn't used <Go><Connect> in Catalina for a while. Now I did and can confirm that this caused severe performance issues in accessing NAS files.

Accessing files on my shared folder via <Go><Connect> took ca. 12 minutes, what used to be a few seconds. Even calculating the size of the shared folder by clicking on <Get Info> took that long.

And when trying to access my NAS via <Locations>, the connection to the NAS was established and I could see my shared Folders, but I could not access them! See screenshots attached.

On the positive side, when dragging shared folders icons from the Desktop as you described, the performance was good as it used to be. Too early to draw final conclusions, but the connection was stable so far, even after Sleep periods and after rebooting the MacBook and/or the NAS server.

FYI: The reason that I had difficulties to find the shared folder icons on the desktop in the first instance was that I seem to have too many screenshots on my desktop and the shared folder icons were heaping up in the upper right hand corner of my desktop, mingled together with multiple icons for files. Very difficult to spot as shared folder icons. Now I have created a dedicated folder for screenshots, so they don't mess up my desktop anymore. 

So, we seem to have at least two workarounds for the time being as far as I tested:

1) Dragging the Shared Folder icons from the Desktop to Favourites

2) Modifying the 'hosts' file as described by @bruno_l as his 'method one'.

There may be other workarounds as well, which is a good thing, but definitely not a solution for the average user who just wants to have a trouble-free MAC OS system.

The action is now with Apple to learn from this thread and implement a reliable solution for Finder as soon as possible.

@Martin Deisting

I tried what Bob Zelin proposed:

Martin Deisting wrote:

"This is how to resolve the Catalina "disconnecting" issue from NAS systems. This has nothing to do with QNAP, or Synology or any other brand. This is an Apple issue, and this is the fix. 

This fix was written by Apple, but it is "hidden" and their own tech support doesn't seem to know it. (crazy - right ?). 

this is as of 5/21/2020. I have verified that this works with multiple clients for the past 30 days. 

On the Mac running macOS 10.15 - open terminal and type this in

nvram boot-args

you will get an error message

now, copy and paste the line below, and put this into terminal, and hit return - it will ask for your password - you will not see anything when you type in your password

sudo nvram boot-args="serverperfmode=1 $(nvram boot-args 2>/dev/null | cut -f 2-)"

now, once again, type in nvram boot-args

you will now see this - 

boot-args. serverprefmode=1

reboot your Mac. 

You will no longer get disconnects

Bob Zelin"

I will see if it solves the problem, since from the beginning I am affected, Cemento's workaround does not solve the problem of Time Machine which fails in my case :-(((

I do hope it works, I will report in few weeks.

@ Martin, once you applied the fix, how do you connect to your NAS ? Using the IP address or the name ?

Thanks,

Fly_PetitPrince

Done - also switched to SMB or AFP only, en- and disabled broadcasting (and the server appears with real name). Time machine works, direct SMB and AFP also (via cmd -k) - but direct access via finder not. You see all folder/drives, but doubleclick Leads to „cannot be found“....

I had this problem for a while as well after upgrading to OS Catalina. I've had problems ever since but they vary. Mostly I would lose connections whenever I rebooted my Mac which I've just done. Now Qfinder doesn't show me any NAS rather than the earlier folders and NAS showing in Finder but when I double clicked it would tell me connection lost.

I shouldn't have to use terminal after every reboot. The last time I had to reboot both my Mac and my NAS to get them to properly connect.

Any suggestions?

Same issue here, connection fails in the Finder.

It got even worse today. Previously, Finder/Connect to Server (%K) was working by entering: 'smb://mynas.local/', but this stopped working as well, for no obvious reason because nothing changed on the NAS or my Mac.

Even worse, connecting to the NAS via Safari also stopped working, e.g. httphttp://mynas.local:5050. The error message from Safari is: 'You are not connected to the Internet'. But I am! But this was working fine this morning! Weird.

Clearing the DNS and ARP caches as suggested by https://mariushosting.com/connection-problem-between-synology-nas-and-macos-catalina/ did not really help.

Only working workaround was to use the NAS's IP address.

Would Apple have tried to resurrect the new DNS server that they never managed to get working in... was it in Sierra?

With no changes, both Catalina 10.15.0 and 10.15.1 show my Synology DiskStation in the Finder sidebar under locations, and clicking on DiskStation automatically presents the server folders in my Finder window. The key to that Connected As… dialog is that you must configure it with the administrator user name and password for the server, and Remember that password in keychain so that just Connect will work on subsequent attempts.

My Synology is automatically doing afpovertcp to Mojave as well as Catalina. Just works.

Have you explored more recent vendor software for your NAS? The incompatibility may originate there, though certainly no excluding Apple antics in Catalina. Then there is booting into Safe Boot mode to clear system caches too.

jmow wrote:

I've just opened a ticket with Synology as you suggested. It's not the first time they would have had to adapt to changes in macOS...

Although the issue is undeniably of Apple's causing there comes a point when the vendors of surround services such as NAS need to bend to Apple's 'will'. The best we can do is to give them enough information and ammunition to solve the issue.

Hi all, until now it seems like it´s a "feature", caused by Catalina. Does anybody from Cupertino want to join the discussion. Until now there seems to be no solution available that let´s me work with the simple "sidebar". SMB connect via CMD-K does work. Fixed IP and an alias on the desktop is also possible. Of course the usage of time machine is configured on the sinology device. I´ve tried to turn on/off SMB and AFP - no solution. Thanks for forwarding to sinology -but once again: Somebody from Apple here?

I have a Drobo NAS and have been seeing the same behavior from Catalina since upgrading. Some times I come home from work and I can connect immediately without incident to the NAS from the link in Finder. Sometimes (more often than not) I just get a Connection failed... message. Every single other thing works fine, including connecting to the NAS via the connect to server function using the IP address. The inconsistency is a bit irritating.

Tossing it around in my head, I started to wonder if something was going on with SMB itself in Catalina. A quick Google search found that some users are looking for a way to move back to SMB v1 from Catalina's SMB v3. As such, I wonder whether Catalina introduced SMB v3 and deprecated v1? I know that at work we've moved to v3 (for very valid security reasons). I'm not, however, certain what version my Drobo 5N is running. It could be something to look into, however.

I tried the following settings on my Synology NAS: SMB v3 only, SMB v2 with Large MTU only, SMB v2 only and SMB v1 only. None allowed Finder to successful mount the remote repository. I did not have time to reboot in the meantime though.

I can get to the server pretty regularly and it maintains my connections mostly. If I use finder and click Go then Connect to Server I can use either the IP address or the name. It then wants me to mount specific folders. I just opened up Finder and the NAS shows up in the sidebar but if I click it I get nothing and if I click Connect AS, it drops all of my mounted folders and never returns the Connect NAS box.

I'm using a QNAP and I'm also having problems with connectivity with the latest release of Window 10 which I recently updated.

I, too, am having problems since upgrade. My iMacPro continues to work as well as it did before upgrade with my two QNAP TVS-872XT NAS units, but QfinderPro on my MacBook Pro cannot see either of them. Despite being on same subnet, with otherwise same setup, and despite being able to connect to the devices manually with apple-K command and being able to complete regularly scheduled TimeMachine backups.

So my mystery is why does one Mac interoperate flawlessly while the other does not.

Somebody tried this and it worked for them (see https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/362739/what-causes-some-network-drives-using-smb-no-longer-connect-to-macos-catalina):

echo "[default]" | sudo tee -a /etc/nsmb.conf
echo "port445=both" | sudo tee -a /etc/nsmb.conf

It did not exactly work for me (only for a few minutes, like after a reboot). But at least, I can now use the "Disconnect" and "Reconnect as..." buttons, which stopped working after I moved to Catalina.

Same problem here. Very frustrating. I found restarting Finder to work, but that's not practical to do constantly, nor do I know if it will work every time. I hope Apple and Synology can get this working again.