Q: Server File Sharing unstable on mac and windows network on Mavericks and OSX Server 3.0

tecitdept,

We definitely have the issue with users not being disconnected, right now we have 60 "live" connections coming from 8 IP addresses and 8 user acounts.

14 days 4 hour and 17 minutes is the longest idle time.

this, however, doesn't seem to impact the mac users at all - the PC users will get a "cannot connect to server" type error, hence our scheduled reboots. Interesetingly, my users with remote user folders (we run Open Directory only, no AD) are connected and disconnected properly.

I bet taking your client to 10.9 would help, though i hear you with the software compatibility issues.

Sandorferenczy,

Interesting. I assumed the multiple connections was somehow the root cause of the file locks we're seeing. Of course, most of the locked documents are office 2011 files. This problem, as you well know I'm sure, has been around forever. Creating the temporary items folders at the root of each share helped a bunch but did not fully solve the issue. We just learned to live with it. For some reason though, it's back with a vengeance.

To be clear, here is the issue I'm seeing wiht multiple user connections. I have a user named Tom. When I log into server app, I can see Tom has 3 connections to the server, sometimes with 2 differenct IP addresses and other times with the same IP address listed multiple times. Tom also connected remotely via Cisco VPN and I'll see multiple connections - 1 IP from the user subnet on the LAN and another connection from the VPN subnet. The IP from the LAN subnet is yesterday's connection as reflected by the idle time and the fact that I know Tom is not in the office.

I also see Mac clients being disconnected sometimes during the day. The error message is something to the effect of "Your connection to the server has been interrupted". That's not verbatim, but you get the idea. I'm gonig to have to go back to the drawing board and investigate from the server to the client. I'm quickly reaching the point of insanity - doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

I know we have at least one initial report that 10.9.2 didn't really fix the connectivity issues related to SMB. We happen to still use AFP for the Mac clients since, in our cursory tests, it seems to be faster with file copy and file/folder rendering in the Finder. I may need to rethink that too.

I'm going to go ahead and upgrade to 10.9.2 this weekend and see what happens. At this point, I don't have much to lose I suppose.

Struggling through setting up a small server network (Mac Mini as server, 2 MacBook Air, 3 iMac) since 3 weeks ...

finally got the network users running (after reinstalling the MacMini the 5th time ...), but now I have to face this problems :

One time it works, the next time I log in with the network users I get the error message

"the userfolder of the user "xyz" is not at his usual place or the access isn`t possible."

Strange is that it works on time, and the next time it doesn´t

Doesn´t matter if I access them from client 1 (a MacBook Air) or client 2 (iMac) .

I haven´t moved the user folders, haven`t renamed them, nothing.

They`re on an external Lacie harddisk at th server (MacMini) connected with Thunderbolt.

Have to set up the whole office with 5 clients by end of next week and still this server things isn`t reliable

Just checked the protocol of the server and found some misterious messages about "unable connections" because "sandbox denied the right to lookup com.apple.coreservices.launchservicesd" ...

Is this the reason of this weird behaviour ?!

I`m pretty clueless about the reason of this strange behaviour, but have to setup the office network by end of next week and a pretty frustrated about this ...

Any help appreciated !

This afternoon i'll be taking the server and a couple clients to 10.9.2 - hopefully it will provide some information??

The one thing i did not consider with regard to the user connection issues is RAM. Our server has 48 GB, so we dont really run in to anu availability issues. However, with a lesser amount i could imagine multiple concurrent user connections causing memory issues. Maybe?

rolandgeoetz - make sure your DNS is properly setup, otherwise Open Directory and networked users folders can be a major headahce.

I would also advice against using netorked user folders on portable computers/wifi - use mobile accounts instead. They will work with wifi on desktops, but ethernet will be a much nicer user experience.

This message is for OSX Server users.

The problems with Mavericks are completely different from the problems with Mountain Lion.  I can tell you with absolute certainty that the new SMB system in Mavericks is not reliable with connected Windows computers. 

If you desire to upgrade to Mavericks, I would strongly recommend that you perform the following steps before an upgrade.  These will give you an immediate fallback option.

1.  Configure three partitions.  One for the sysetm, another for a system backup and a third for your data. 

2.  Clone your system partition to a new partition before the upgrade.  CCCloner is a good tool for cloning the system partition.

3.  Upgarde to Mavericks

4.  When you are dissatisfied, switch your boot partition to the partition that you cloned in step one and you will be back to where you started before the update to Mavericks.

Of note:

Open Directory

OD is fragile.  Any change to the hostname of your computer will break OD beyond repair (no changeip won't fix the problem).  If you delete or change keychains used by OD or the Server app, OD can break.  The only fix is to destroy your OD Master,  export users and groups in Workgroup manager and re-import them after a new OD is built.  Users will need to reset their passwords once complete.

About the only problem that can be solved without destroying your OD Master is a problem with forward or reverse DNS, which have to resolve to your machine's hostname.

Mavericks

File access seems OK until Windows machines attempt to load an executable file from the server.  Also, some Windows applications do not seem to respect ACL's on the Mac server.  I haven't found any solution to these issues.  If you have Windows copmuters that need to access files on the Apple Server, I strongly urge everyone to postphone upgrades to Maverics.

Mountain Lion

Windows machines will loose connections to Mountain Lion Server during large file transfers or under load.  The Windows registry can be modified to solve this problem as follows.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LanmanWorkstation\Paramete rs]

"SessTimeout"=dword:00008ca0

"ExtendedSessTimeout"=dword:00008ca0

"ServersWithExtendedSessTimeout"=dword:00008ca0

"OffLineFileTimeoutIntervalInSeconds"=dword:00008ca0

It is a shame that Apple won't address these problems.  The could have a great product here.

Hi, I wonder wich problems you encounterd installing OS X Server that made you install this 5 times...

I always first configure IP, and setup the server as stand-alone. After this I configure DNS and set OS X to use the server itself as primairy DNS. After this, make the server an OpenDirectory server (check Kerberos realm settings and DNS resolving) and finaly setup  shares, users and groups.

Use no domain which ends with .local (use .lan, .private or the company domain name, but keep in mind that if you use a domain name - company.com - which this server isn't realy the root-server for, you won't be able to go to the company's website (if your workstations use the server as primairy dns server) - www.company.com - because it thinks that it's internal (add a A record for www which resolves to the website IP at the provider!).

Check hostname using changeip -checkhostname (as root) to see if the server name is ok.

Now, if you have set a home-folder location when adding a user (and you don't use a homefolder on the server -> only use this if you want your clients the connect to OD using not a local homefolder but on the server itself) remove this setting, set it to none. If you don't use any services that require binding the workstations to OD, just don't bind them (not sure if you have this though....).

Same problems over here with instability on Mavericks 10.9.1, updated to 10.9.2 today, so we'll know next week if this does anything good.... Anyway, no happy faces over here with Apple's vision on server-software.

To say that "OD is fragile" is to put a bit of a reverse-spin on things.
What many would-be admins and novices get into trouble with, is A. Being new to essential networking concepts & services & proper configuration & management of same, and B. Following best-practices for the setup of OS X server.

Charles Edge has some great guides here:
http://krypted.com/guides/mavericks-server/    

You must ensure that DNS is configured & confirmed working (forward and reverse lookup(s) ) for your server.
I suggest using a sub-domain rather than a fake "tld" - eg:  of for office or in for internal, meaning:
of.company.com or in.company.com with a fqdn for your server thus being server.of.company.com
or srv.company.com

In terms of the stability of OD, keep in mind that it's quite emphatically best to plan *prior* to your installation, and not change the hostname or IP address of your server once it's installed.
Also, a quality UPS is non-optional. Do not ever let your server be taken out by a power outage (besides, power dips that you might not even notice can do more harm over time to computer equipment). Yes, OD often can be hosed by a spurious loss of power. It's a server, servers should never be exposed to sudden power loss, period (to the extent that one can prevent such an occurrence, it's critical and best-practice to do so).

As to the question of stability for File-Sharing, so far so good in my own experience with it, BUT that is with Mac-only clients. If you look into something like ExtremeZ-IP on the Windows side, they (last I checked) don't support the same share being used by Windows clients, due to significant differences between how Windows and OS X handle file-locking. Which could be what's at the root of the problem people are seeing (not sure, but it came to mind right away).

Up to 10.6 server when Apple was still using Samba (and they can't any more due to Samba's adoption of GPLv3, see https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3206725?start=75&tstart=0 ), they accomplished quite a feat in terms of somehow handling the cross-platform file-locking issue in some manner.
Now that Apple has had to replace Samba with their own code, it's not surprising that there are problems, this is a massive, massive thing to even attempt to do. I'm not being an apologist for Apple, but trying to bring some cold hard perspective on things.

I'm sure we all wish 10.9 server was already perfect, but the past has shown that Apple's server product is typically most ready for real-world use by about the .3 update, sometimes later.
And I've been working with OS X server since it first existed (IIRC, I did ACSA certification for nearly all but one of the iterations of OS X Server, while the ACSA certification still existed).

(Note that text lacks tone of voice, so please know that there's no desire or intent to fly my own flag here, just providing some amount of personal context).

I had a lot of SMB2 related problems (see Incoming Links). Since Apple finally fixed some SMB related bugs in 10.9.2, it was time for a retest.

Here are some results to ‘share’ :

• Both 32 and 64 bit Windows 8.1 clients can open PDF files and edit Office documents now. The bad news is that it is still not possible to open anything with Notepad. Error message ‘the specified server cannot perform the requested operation’  and lots of invalid file attribute lines in the system log. Opening with Wordpad doesn’t cause these problems, so it must have something to do with the way Notepad opens files.
• Using a 32 bit Windows 7 client: no problems. A 64 bit client however causes lots of locking issues. You can edit a text file, save it, but not reopen it (file is being used….).
• The same (notepad) errors occur when you don’t use the OSX server at all (just Mavericks sharing…).
• Forcing Windows to use SMB1 seems to work but is a bit tricky and slows down file sharing between Windows systems as well.
• I installed SMBUP and this seems to work (and uses SMB2 as well, as far as I know).

I’m not waiting for 10.9.3 anymore, it’s a waste of time. I'll upgrade my server to 10.9.2, install SMBup and uninstall OSX server (I don’t need the other services). Or I buy a home nas server…. Thanks Apple.

Any other suggestions?

So 10.9.2 is installed.

as a laughable aside, rebooting the server kicked 6,037 users off the server. that was about 15 days of uptime.

we'll see how it performs in the coming days.

Hello DavidH.  Good comments!  No offense taken.

Maybe I should have written that OD is unforgiving and difficult if not imposible to repair if broken; requires planning and a knowledgeable admin who knows what to do to keep from breaking it.  There are many undocumented pitfalls and not much documentation.  Please disagree if I'm mistaken.  I'd love to be wrong.

This is a problem for me, down here at the SMB sales channel level.

Same smb2 file sharing issue but I do agree microsoft can go suck **** even though I have many of their systems on the network and I want to let users continue to share files untill I have time to get rid of the rest the ******* windows machines.

John Larse, SMB CEO and Apple shareholder

Has anyone tried SMB up as an alternative? I'm at the stage where this is my only option:

https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/41541/smbup

But would like to know if anyone has experience, if it's worth while?

This may help. It is working for me in my mixed OS small office.

I created a post explaining the 2 things I had to do to make it work. Basically Opportunistic Locking needs to be shut off and there is an obscure place in Preferences that a setting has to be changed in order to enable a Windows share to user's.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/24889571#24889571

Koa noise - Thanks for your post!  I followed the first part of your other post (turnning off OpLocks on the Windows clients) and have had half a day so far without having to do a "save as" everytime an open file says it is in use.  So at this point I am cautiously optimistic.  I appreciate you taking the time to post your solution.  Knock wood, so far so good for me...

I am curious however what the potential negative side effects are to disabling the OpLocks.  Have you encountered any?  Someone opening the same file as another user and messing with the file or corrupting them?  I tried reading about it on the Microsoft website, but some of it was too technical for me to exactly understand what OpLocks is doing.  But it made it seem that disabling OpLocks wasn't an ideal option.  However, if I can get through a day of working on Microsoft Office files without the files telling me they are read only, I guess I'm willing to live with other potential down sides.  Hopefully they aren't too dire...