Server Connections Interrupted

I am having the same problem as the rest of the post chain, regular appearances of "Server Connection Interrupted".

My occurrence is slightly different. I have three Time Capsules, on my network, they are all wireless off, connected to a Cisco switch via Ethernet. There is an Airport Extreme Base Station and two Airport Express. All TCs and the AEBS and AEs were purchased within the last 6 months of 2011.

Previous to the "Server Connection Interrupted" messages appearing I used a Cisco RVS4000 to manage DHCP, and firewall etc on the network. The AE was used as a WAP. In this config, I never saw the "Server Connection Interrupted".

After upgrading my DSL account to get higher bandwidth I removed the Cisco device and reconfigured the Airport Extreme to be a full feature WAP, router etc. The firmware on all Tcs and the AE was 7.5.2, in this config the "Server Connection Interrupted" didn't appear. I upgraded the TCs and AE to the latest firmware, 7.6, and the warning boxes started appearing regularly.

The "Server Connection Interrupted" warning only seems to appear on TCs that are not being accessed or have not been accessed for a period of time, I am not sure how long that period is. I would look at the WAPA Group Key Timeout on the Wireless Network Options tab of the AE first, the default is 1 hour. It would be interesting to note whether the appearance of the dialogue "Server Connection Interrupted" dialogue is around the time the Group Key changes?

Perhaps the DHCP server in the AE is treating a drive as disconnected because it is not responding properly when the AE polls it after the key has changed.

It could also be that the 7.6 firmware on the AEBS is not managing the polling of attached but inactive devices properly. I have downgraded the firmware to 7.5.2 on one of the TCs that regularly report the "Server Connection Interrupted" error and the AEBS. So far, the two TCs running firmware 7.6 are reporting disconnected periodically, the TC that was downgraded to 7.5.2 has not!

As I changed the firmware on a TC and the AEBS at the same time it is not possible to pin the problem to the AEBS firmware or the TC, but I am going on the assumption that it is the TC and am downgrading all three TCs to 7.5.2.

M

My TC is acting as a bridge. It is connected to my Netgear gigabit switch via a wired ethernet connection. The netgear switch is connected to a Linksys WRVS4400N Wireless gigabit router.

My wired Macs are connected to the Netgear gigabit switch as well. My wireless Macs predominantly connect to the 5GHz access point on the TC and slower devices such as iPhone connect to the 2.4GHz access point on the TC. Wireless devices on my network can connect to any of my 4 access points. Regardless of how any of my Macs connect to the TC (wired or wireless) I still get the popup dialogue - but with less frequency in a wireless scenario.

If I factor AFP out of the picture - (by mounting a share on TC via smb://) the popup never occurrs. The problem seems to be related to a combination of AFP, Lion and something in the 7.6 firmware on TC.

I am going to try disabling the wireless access points on the Time Capsule to see if this changes the behavior of the popup. I will report back with the results.

~Scott

I disabled the wireless access point on the Time Capsule - and the disconnect popup warning did not appear at all - after repeated attempts during the day to try to get the server disconnect popup dialogue to appear by copying large amounts of data to the Time Capsule.

This would tell me that something is not quite right with the wireless changes that were introuduced in the 7.6 firmware. Even though my connections were "wired" to the time capsule - something was happening with regard to other wireless connections on the Time Capsule such that it was impacting the active wired connections to the Time Capsule where AFP mounts were involved.

As stated by ashforma in the previous post - it could have something to do with the timing of the rotation of the group key (which was not happening today in my testing because wireless was disabled on the Time Capsule.

I will now reinstate the wireless access point(s) on the TC and see if the problem resurfaces.

~Scott

Well, the Disconnect Warning dialogue popped up again - quite a number of hours after the last large file was copied to the Time Capsule. The popup is now behaving a bit differently than previously when the wireless access point was enabled. Disabling the wireless access point on the TimeCapsule did NOT resolve the disconnect popup issue - it simply changed its behavior. Now the popup is much delayed and less frequent. It only occurred on one of three Macs.

I have now downgraded to firmware 7.5.2. I will report back with results after some more testing.

~Scott.

The Time Capsule does not provide a user setting for controlling when the hard drive will spin down due to inactivity. Observation seems to indicate that the drive will spin down anywhere between 3 and 5 minutes after the drive is last accessed. This short inactivity interval makes some sense - as the Time Capsule's primary function was probably intended as a TimeMachine backup drive - to be accessed once per hour during the day. A user-definable inactivity interval could potentially prevent the Time Capsule from ever spinning down. Although this short interval works great for the Time Machine backup use case, the short inactivity spindown does not necessarily lend itself well to having a folder mounted from the Time Capsule all of the time. I typically use the Time Capsule primarily for Time Machine backups - and as a holding tank for files that I am temporarily moving around my network - so I only have shares mounted for long periods of time in the event that I forget to unmount them.

In any case - the Time Capsule has worked fine for me for well over a year and has not exhibited this behavior until around the time that I upgraded to Lion - and of course there were two time capsule firmware upgrades in that same time period.

I still have a strong feeling that this problem is related to some type of recent change to the AFP implementation. It doesn't happen at all if I mount shares on the Time Capsule via Samba (smb://). It also never happens on my D-Link DNS 323 NAS - which only supports Samba shares.

~Scott

I have had my Time Capsule running on the 7.5.2 firmware all day - and I am still seeing the popup. The behavior is slightly different still (as stated in my previous post when I disabled WiFi on 7.6). The pop up warning is less frequent and greatly delayed.

I am now going to revert back to the 7.6 firmware. I think the only thing that I can do at this point is report the issue as a bug on the apple feedback page as well as possibly opening an AppleCare incident - at least to make Apple aware of the issue.

~Scott

If it helps, I've had a very consistent failure case with the 7.6 firmware. I have an Airport Extreme with USB disk array, connected via Ethernet. The AEBS does nothing else, other than make my USB disk appear on the network as AFP and SMB shares. With anything prior to 7.6, I never had the "Server Connections Interrupted" message, ever. As soon as I went to 7.6, I started seeing that message. I suffered with it for a month or so, I guess. Then, about a week ago, I downgraded to 7.5.2, and I've not seen the message since. My usage of the disk hasn't changed, nor has anything else in my home network, so it seems pretty clear to me that there's something in the 7.6 firmware that's causing an issue.

- Mike

Thanks Mike. I actually did a factory reset after I had gone back to 7.5.2 - and then re-upgraded to 7.6 and reconfigured the Time Capsule from scratch. This seems to have made some improvement to the problem or rather changed its behavior slightly - but the popup still occurs - and only when a share is mounted on the TC (via AFP) and some significant amount of data has been copied to a folder via the share. Then the popup continues periodically until the AFP share is disconnected. The popup never occurs if I mount the share via SMB. All of my Macs are on Lion 10.7.2 - except for the neighbors MacBookPro (Snow Leopard 10.6.8) which I back up periodically for them. I've tested the popup issue on Snow Leopard 10.6.8 and it occurs there as well.

I will try one more time to go back to 7.5.2 - but I am not expecting anything to be resolved. I am planning on contacting Apple as soon as I get some free time.

~Scott

Just went back to 7.5.2 on the Time Capsule a second time. This time I was sure to shutdown and restart everything. The discconect popup still appears after copying data to a share.

Now going back to 7.5.1.

Any chance that you could go back to 7.5.2 or 7.5.1 (for a day or so) to see if the behavior goes away. I seem to be the only one that has the behavior on all 3 firmware version 7.5.1, 7.5.2 and 7.6 (I did not go back to 7.5) and probably won't. Everyone else is saying that reverting to 7.5.2 resolves the issue.

~Scott

Hey,

I 've donwgraded the TC to 7.5.2 and at this moment it seems that this behaviour doesn't happen again. So at this point it seems to be resolved.

Just fyi - after i performed the upgrade to 7.6 i noticed that the TC lost his network connections ... apperently the initiated reboot after upgrade wasn't succesful, so I initiated a hard reboot ... and since that I got the network back but than with the anoying connection interupted msgs.

Sorry to hear that you still encounter these msgs even after downgrading. hopefully it can be resolved soon!

Cheers

Can you please report back if the problem resurfaces for you on 7.5.2? When I downgraded to 7.5.2 - None of my wifi devices could connect to the Time Capsule. (I did not eperience this problem - or any wifi problems - when I initially "upgraded" to 7.6.

Due to the wifi malfunction after the downgrade from 7.6 to 7.5.2 - I ended up doing several resets - one via the button on the back, one from within Airport Utility - and finally a factory default reset from Airport Utility. I basically reconfigured my TC from scratch - and then the basic functionality was restored. At first I did not see the disconnect popup - and assumed all was fine - but then after a few hours (and after copying my iTunes library to the TC several times - the popup was back as usual - no change at all from 7.6. (Note: I use my iTunes and iPhoto libraries for this test because they contain multiple gigabytes of data - sufficient to cause the problem - I can reproduce the problem consistently with any large amount of data - such as copying a disk image file, etc. - it's just easiest to use my iTunes and iPhoto for the test).

I then went back to 7.6 and going back to 7.6 was very smooth - no need to do anything special. I then decided to try 7.5.1. The downgrade from 7.6 to 7.5.1 was smooth - no issues. I made sure to completely power off everything just to avoid the possibility of anything hanging around from the previous firmware. Again - same behavior - initially appeared to be fine - then after copying data to an AFP share on the TC - resulted in the same identical popup behavior.

During all of these "downgrades" I also tested wirelessly. I can reproduce the disconnect popup both wired and wirelessly. It appears that in my specific scenario - I experience the disconnect popup more easily (or rather it is more easily reproduced) in the wired situation vs wireless - which seems somewhat contradictory to what others have been reporting on this thread.

I have a follow up call scheduled with Apple Care on my support issue tomorrow (Tuesday) - hopefully they will have something to report.

~Scott

I heard back from AppleCare on my Time Capsule issue. They are saying that based on my TC serial number - my unit contains a specific internal hard drive where the the internal hard drive's firmware is not 100% compatible with changes in the TC firmware that have been taking place since 7.5.1. They are replacing my Time Capsule and I will be picking up the replacement from the Apple Store tonight. Not sure whether it will be a refurbished unit or a brand new one.

I'm not totally convinced that this is going to solve the problem - because I was still seeing the disconnect error even with a USB drive attached to the TC - without ever mounting the TC's internal drive. I should know by morning if this is going to resolve the issue. I'm also not sure how they are going to know whether the replacement TC does not also have the same internal drive with the incompatible drive firmware.

Something else to note: I had to copy all my data off the time capsule - because I did not want to lose my backups. I tried the "archive" option via the Airport Utility. What I found is that it is incredibly slow and makes the Time Capsule unavailble while it performs the archive process. I'm on a gig network at home - and discovered that it is much faster to copy data directly to a wired desktop (if there is enough space to do so) rather than to wait for the archive process. It appeared that the archive process would have taken 15 hours to copy 1.3 Terabytes - however I was able to do that via ethernet to two different macs in just over 6 hours.

Also if you are trying to copy data from the TC to the external drive attached to the TC (via finder rather than the archiver) don't forget that it will also be very slow because all that data has to transfer from the TC to the Mac and then back through the TC to the external drive. Much faster to copy from the TC over the network to an external drive attached to the Mac - or even a little faster to copy the data to the Mac - and then copy from the Mac to the external drive.

~Scott

If it is any consolation the "Server Connection Interrupted" message is not unique to Time Capsule configurations. Those of us on Lion with Airport Extreme and a connected external disk being used for Time Machine backups also have been receiving the same message since the Airport 7.6 "upgrade". The message pops up continually. Reverting to AE v. 7.5.2 stops it.

Snow Leopard is not affected. We have two laptops connected to the same AE and disk. The Lion laptop gets the message the Snow Leopard does not.

I beleive it is an issue that only Apple can resolve - and would if they truly understood the root cause. I have tried all the remedies listed on the board and found none to be satisfactory.

The "sleep" function on my WD external drive may also be contributing but why would only Lion OS's be impacted?

Good luck with the new TC - hope your results are satisfactory.

I got it with Snow Lion and an AE upgraded to 7.6— so it might be machine/configuration-dependent, but it doesn't seem to be Lion-dependent. (Going back to 7.5.2 on the AE made the errors go away for me, too)

I, too, had wondered whether it has something to do with a sleep function on my WD Elements drive that is connected to the AE...