Posts Tagged ‘Network share’
Time Machine Error: “The backup volume is read only” on NAS (DNS-323)
I wrote a while back here about how I’d set up my D-Link DNS-323 NAS to allow Time Machine backups from my two macs. All has been going well up to a few days ago when I was greeted with this dialog on my MacBook after an automated backup attempt:
Nothing has changed on my DNS-323 config-wise and my Mac Mini’s Time Machine still works fine, using exactly the same network share as my MacBook and the same username and password so I’m more than a little confused by this!
There are literally hundreds of google search results pointing to forum posts discussing this but they all seem to suggest the same thing; after trying the obvious (Use Disk Utility to repair the drive, done… Power off the drive and mac and restart them both, done….) just reformat your drive. I really don’t want to do this so I’m going to keep trying. Will report back my findings, but has anyone out there resolved this issue without a reformat?
Maybe this is the reason Apple turned off support for ‘unsupported’ network volumes afterall? I really hope not.
Trust issues working on a network share in Visual Studio 2008
Posted by richard in Software Development on February 14th, 2009
An unfortunate combination of my rear-wheeled drive car and the mini-ice age which hit us here in Northamptonshire left me stranded and working from home earlier this week. Not a problem I thought, as I had previously taken the liberty of backing up my current source onto the USB stick I carry with me and already had a VMWare Fusion image with XP and MS Visual Studio 2008 on my MacBook.
So in went the USB key, project folder copied to my “Documents” folder and the XP virtual machine opened. But after browsing to the network drive which VMWare maps onto my OS X “Documents” folder and opening the solution file, I was greeted with something that looks like this:
A quick google search for this error message brought me to this MSDN article which looked promising, but despite having a full VS 2008 SP1 install on my machine I couldn’t find Mscorcfg.msc anywhere, and the suggested Caspol.exe command just didn’t work!
According to this article, I needed to install the .NET Framework 2.0 Software Development Kit (SDK) (x86) from here to then get the “Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Configuration” tool which should help. Once all 300+mb of it was downloaded and installed it then appeared in my Control Panel -> Administrative Tools, progress at last!
In the tool, expand “My Computer” and select “Runtime Security Policy” to get the following:
From here I was then able to select “Adjust Zone Security” to be taken to the “Security Adjustment Wizard”. After selecting whether I want to make changes to the computer or current user only (I chose computer) and clicking “Next”, I was taken to the important part, the zone security level settings. The problem with trusted network shares appears to be caused by the “Local Intranet” zone defaulting to one “notch” below “Full Trust”, causing all sorts of havoc to my VS2008 security. By moving the slider up to “Full Trust” for the “Local Intranet” zone and clicking “Next” and then “Finish” to close the wizard I was then able to successfully load, compile and debug VS2008 projects located on a network share.
I must admit that I’m still not 100% convinced that this is either the correct or even a safe solution so please exercise caution when changing zone security settings, especially on networks with internet access, and feel free to set me straight in the comments if this is far off the mark, but in the meantime it has at least enabled me to perform the tasks I have been able to carry out with every other IDE I’ve ever used and develop code on a network share!
Using Time Machine with a normal network share
It’s no great secret that OS X supports Apple’s shiny (and slightly overpriced, IMHO) Time Capsule straight out of the box as a backup volume for Time Machine, but trying to get it working with a normal network share takes a bit more fiddling, even with Leopard (10.5.6). After finding a few slightly conflicting “how-to”s on various blogs here’s what I did to get it working with my D-Link DNS-323 NAS.
- First, configure Time Machine to use “unsupported” network shares by typing the following into a console window:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1 - Now, under normal circumstances you’d expect this to just work, as long as you have mounted the network share you wish to use as a backup destination, it should now appear in the “Change Disk…” listing in Time Machine Preferences, but try to run with this and it will sit “Preparing” for a bit then fail with a “The Backup Disk Image could not be mounted.” error message.
- Start Time Machine off again trying to backup but this time watch your network share.
- You will see that a file is created in the following structure:
ComputerName_MACAddress.tmp.sparcebundle, copy this filename. Once the backup attempt fails, this file will disappear so try again if you don’t manage to catch it. It appears that Time Machine has a problem creating this file and so the whole thing bombs out. So, let’s give it a helping hand and create one for it! - Open Disk Utility on your Mac. Click “New Image” and use the following settings, in the following order:
- Save as ComputerName_MACAddress (that you copied above, minus the “tmp” part)
- Set whatever you want as the Volume Name.
- Skip over Volume Size for the moment.
- Change Partition to “No Partition Map”.
- Change Image Format to “Sparce Bundle Disk Image”.
- Now set the Volume Size, select “Custom Volume Size” and set it to the maximum size you want to use for your backup volume. Don’t worry if you don’t have the hdd space as this is a maximum size only, it won’t immediately create an image file that size. For example I created one set to 900gb which resulted in an image file around 200mb initially.
- Create the image.
- Now copy this image file to your original backup destination network share.
- Start Time Machine off again, and this time it shouldn’t fail.
As I type I’ve now got both my MacBook and Mac Mini backing up to a single network share on my DNS323 “toaster” NAS, I’ll report any problems.
