FreeNAS / TrueNAS and PowerPC

[feelingsupersonic]

This is really general... I have my home NAS being run by TrueNAS. It works really well and my SMB (CIFS) shares have no issues being accessed from my Windows, macOS, and Linux machines. Seems like nearly all systems can readily deal with SMB shares.

Then, as usual, my PowerPC fleet has some kind of hang up. I can see that shares exist, and go so far as to attempt a log-in when I am prompted for my credentials (Leopard and Tiger). But it's always an error after that. I have enabled support for SMB v1 which goes back decades, and is far from ideal... but even this doesn't work.

What are you guys doing for network shares? I know that I could switch to Linux but what is the point... I already have Linux machines.
I want to set up my Mac Mini G4 in my guest bedroom for my sister so she can watch movies/shows from my NAS when she visits next week but so far I am coming up empty! Maybe there is a different type of share (i.e. alternative to SMB) that is compatible? Or a tweak that needs to made somewhere?

 

[eyoungren]

Both Leopard and Tiger have Apple's implementation of SMB, which is very different than the standard. It wasn't until later versions of OS X (after Mavericks I think) that Apple fully embraced the industry standard for SMB.

Tiger's implementation is even worse than Leopard's.

If you have the option in your NAS settings to disable digital signing and allow network passwords to be submitted in the clear (no encryption) then this is in general what is necessary. Defeats security, but that's the way Tiger and Leopard are.

Alternatively, if you can find a copy of DAVE (by Thursby software) then installing it on the Tiger and Leopard Macs will give you the industry standard SMB and allow you to connect without modifying anything.

However, if your NAS has AFP then I would suggest activating that. There may not be any option that says "AFP" or "Apple Sharing" but if your NAS allows for TM backups that should enable AFP.

 

[feelingsupersonic]

Thanks! I looked at the digital signing thing, and I didn't see a clear way to do this on TrueNAS. And even if so, I wouldn't be excited about making that change.

However it turns out that TruNAS supports AFP. And it worked! I have it as a "parallel" share, so only the old Macs use it, everything else on my network uses the SMB share of the same dataset.

For posterity, for those who find this on google down the road: I would not recommend using a Samba share in the traditional sense (from Linux or Windows file sharing). The cleanest solution is to make a TrueNAS virtual machine and bridge the virtual network adaptor, so it gets assigned an IP address by your router just like any other computer would. You should be able to pass through a USB external hard drive or SATA port to the VM as the source.

I am using ProxMox on an old Ivy Bridge server and passed through a PCI-express LSI card which is linked to a 36 terabyte disk shelf with a SAS cable but you could probably do this even with Virtualbox or something on your modern desktop.

Also - eyoungren, this copy of DAVE by Thursby software. I looked into it and the price is far out of reach for the kind of stuff average people are doing. Is there an abandonware copy or something? I am not a pirate and I will not steal software but am curious if there is an alternative to buying it directly, I cannot imagine that the version support PPC Macs is their latest release.

 

[eyoungren]

Thanks! I looked at the digital signing thing, and I didn't see a clear way to do this on TrueNAS. And even if so, I wouldn't be excited about making that change.

However it turns out that TruNAS supports AFP. And it worked! I have it as a "parallel" share, so only the old Macs use it, everything else on my network uses the SMB share of the same dataset.
Also - eyoungren, this copy of DAVE by Thursby software. I looked into it and the price is far out of reach for the kind of stuff average people are doing. Is there an abandonware copy or something? I am not a pirate and I will not steal software but am curious if there is an alternative to buying it directly, I cannot imagine that the version support PPC Macs is their latest release.

Glad it worked!

DAVE has always been expensive, but Macintosh Garden has 6.2.1: http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/thursby-dave-621

I know it says OS 9.2.2, but I've used Dave 5 and Dave 6 on Tiger.

Thursby had a solution and like Adobe with Photoshop and Illustrator, they cornered the market so they could charge what they wanted for the app. They also made AdmitMac, which is a server version that allows any older Mac to connect without having to install DAVE.

Used to retail for around $500-600 IIRC.