Server Connections Interrupted

To DJ - Glad to hear you have made contact with Apple. You might want to reference Applecare Case# 281555173 - as that case contains all the information that I provided them when I did extensive troubleshooting with one of their senior engineers over a year ago regarding the issues mentioned in this thread.

Best of luck - and please report back.

~Scott

I have had a share mounted on the Time Capsule for over 33 hours via cifs:// without any issue. I am able to use the share and I do not see any messages in the log related to this share. It appears to be working fine.

~Scott

I think it is worth noting (and hopefully to the tech who contacts you, DJ) that there seems to be multiple situations displaying similar symptoms...i.e the disconnect/reconnect sequence, TC partial drive spinup, and, in many cases, the accompanying popup notification.

When I first started lookiing into this I seem to recall multiple threads on the forum with those characteristics but what appear to be differing accompanying circumstances. But all had in common the above symptoms.

Adding to this a bit...

I have a USB Drive plugged into an airport router, being used by iTunes. I get the infamous popup in the mornings.

Last night I purchased the season pass for The Following. I have iTunes set to NOT download multiple files at once. So, in the morning it was still downloading - and there wasn't any popup.

Activity all night - no popup. No activity - popup.

I have great news. I've been working with Apple for a week now, performing log collections and exchanging data and tech I've been working with says engineering has been able to duplicate the problem, and is working on a fix.

They say they do not have an ETA as of yet, but that the fix will probably be deployed as a firmware or software update.

This means, hopefully, many of you who are still having issues, will have your time capsule and AE file sharing problems resolved in the near future.

Apple has been extremely receptive, and I could not ask for better treatment.

To DJ - Thank you for following through with this and spending your valuable time helping Apple reproduce the problem. Hopefully they will be able to fix it quickly and this thread will finally come to an end.

With so many people having slightly different occurences of the problem - did Apple happen to give any indication of what the exact cause of the problem might be?

Please keep us posted.

~Scott

DJ

Thanks for your persistence. I was not optimistic about Apple's ability to reproduce the errors. And absent that it seemed the discussions were going nowhere. It is a credit to the company that they do have an executive resolution process...and somehow almost a shame that this is the card that had to be played in order to make progress...but kudos to you for the effort!

Thanks for finally getting Apple to see this issue! I'm also a victim of it and have always kept my AirPort Extreme on firmware 7.5.2 to avoid this.

I would love to see this fixed so I can keep my router up-to-date. Please let us know if you have any updates on this issue!

Hi everyone, I've been following this discussion for a long while and have seen how it's evolved in the past year or so. Like all of you, it started for me when I kept getting harmless "Server connections interrupted" pop ups in a seemingly distinct pattern / condition.

I don't use time machine to back up my files, instead I use it purely as a wireless external HD. I added the "Data" volume into my login item list and that's how I've been using it since the original problem surfaced after an earlier hardware update.

But just when I was starting to get used to the annoyance, it stopped completely one day (for a while, I thought the nightmare was finally over, but it didn't). I'm not sure but I have a feeling that the behavior change following a recent hardware update, 7.6.3?

My "Data" volume stays connected for a couple of minutes after booting up, but then it starts to unmount if there is no read or write activity after that first few minutes. I will have to click on finder, select my TC under the list of shared devices, double click on Data to have the disk mounted back.

But this time round, it doesn't stay mounted longer than a minute. I have my entire itunes music library on the TC disk, and the problem is so ridiculously bad that everytime i pause a song halfway through playback, pause a movie on quicktime player half way through playback, the disk disconnects!

My only work around is to have one mp3 on the TC disk to play on quicktime, on loop, and at no volume.

Anyone having the same problem?

Looking forward to the fix, thanks for the persistence, DJ!

Have just reverted back to 7.5.2 myself to try to stop the endless stream of afp popups. So far so good. I had hoped that the recent upgrade to 7.6.3. would be the fix, but it seemed to make things even worse. Am using attached USB drive for TC as well as general NAS, everything has been OK while reading/writing to the volume, but if the connection has been idle for more than a few seconds, the afp drops start showing up in the log.

Michael, et al

If you glance back in this thread you will no doubt note that there appear to be a variety of conditions which exhibit some or all of a set of similar symptoms- i.e disconnect popup messages, disconnect/reconnect sequences in the logs, and possibly partial spinups/spindown of the TC drive. While DJ's persistence and Apple's belated but welcomed agreement that there is a problem offers some hope, I have some concern that unless they read through this entire thread they may find some patch which only addresses a subset of the conditions which cause these errors.

My own extensive work with Scott indeed came up with what seems to have addressed the problem effectively in my particular situation. My speculative conclusion was that Apple's focus in on the use of the TC as a Time Machine, and the involvement of three or four different areas of the company may have created the problem and makes it more complex to totally resolve. These areas of interest are hardware, firmware, OS X, and perhaps a development group responsible separately for TM.

While there is some limited advertising by some group in Apple ( maybe Marketing) which says you can store data on the TC...I'm not sure if or how deeply anyone in the company researched or tested that before putting the marketing blurb in print. At any rate, in my situation it became pretty apparent that not designating the TC as my TM (I had a separate USB drive which I connected to my Mac for TM backup) was the key factor in the problem. Once I changed and directed TM to use the TC for backup I never again got a popup or partial drive spinup. I did continue to see the disconnect/reconnect error sequences in the logs, but only under one condition: If I had the "Data" share connected and Time Machine kicked off a backup. So my workaround is to be sure to not leave the "Data" share connected unless I am actually reading or writing data from/to it.

Since I too have an extensive iTunes library on the TC, if I expect to be playing music from that for more than an hour, I simply "turn off" Time Machine for that period. I do not experience the "Data" share disconnecting by itself.

I realize this is a "jury-rigged" solution. I also realize this approach may not address the vast variety of circumstances which seem to create the errors. I do not think the problem is correctable within a single area of the company. So perseverance and additional input from more people through the same channel DJ thought of and found may well be required, once the company is given reasonable time to explore a fix for the specific situations DJ brought to their attention.

Perhaps DJ would be willing to report back at some point on status of his interaction with Apple?

Point of clarification: I just re-read my post, and see that I typed TC when I meant TM, chalk it up to old age. I am running the Airport Extreme (not Time Capsule) with an external 2TB USB drive, partitioned for 2 TM volumes, and one storage volume. Not trying to run any streaming sources from that drive, it's all just backup in one form or another (including symlinks for iOS backups), all of which has worked just fine for a couple years except for these post-7.6 afp error popups. Reverting to 7.5.2 made them stop, but I sure would love to know why.

Must be getting time to retire, I am getting tired of working IT issues all day then coming home to work them on nights and weekends too! At least at work I can blame the users...;)

Hmm...that is intriguing, Michael

I have the suspicion that an Airport Extreme with an attached drive is functionally identical (in terms of the firmware/OS/software) to a TC...the only difference really is the physical connection of the drive (USB versus SATA or whatever the TC inbternal drive uses) and whatever management that imposes. If I were an overall Project Manager for both the TC and Airport Extreme that is certainly the way I would want things designed, for ease of maintenance and enhancements.

But are you positive that it was the reversion to 7.5.2 which made the errors disappear? The reason I ask is, if OS X was also upgraded at some point (which might possibly included a change to TM as well-unless Apple is different from anyplace else I know of not every single change in a release, and in particular a "minor" one, is identified at the user level)...maybe there were multiple changes in around the same timeframe which had an impact.

But I sure agree with your last sentence. I finally weaned myself off Windows to attempt to avoid exactly this type of extensive problem research and workarounds. While even the log messages were more annoyng than critical (the errors were not stealing enough cycles to produce any noticeable slowdown in the system) the drive partial spinups were alarming and unacceptable-"rotating rust" does not like continual changes of speed, and partials are particularly dangerous.

tessmar wrote:

But are you positive that it was the reversion to 7.5.2 which made the errors disappear?

Yes, since I only did the downgrade to 7.5.2 after reading this thread, and no other OS updates have been applied to any of my machines since the downgrade. My rule here (same as work) is to only change one variable at a time. And, as soon as I downgraded, the popups stopped. BTW, as nearly as I can recall, they began at 7.6.1, and got a bit more frequent when I upgraded to 7.6.3 just last week. And of course, I did several complete shutdown/reboot cycles for all devices before doing the downgrade, just to eliminate the possibility of accumulated digital lint being the culprit.

I can confirm that an AirPort Extreme on 7.5.2 will not exhibit the disconnection pop ups or disk spin up every 5 minutes or the DoReconnect console messages, whilst anything above that will. I was on it just last week.

My experience is that every single AirPort firmware version beyond 7.5.2 will exhibit this behavior when an external disk is connected via USB and such disk is mounted on a Mac. The behavior doesn't seem to occur if the disk is not mounted on any computer.