Jul 23, 2011
Casey, a reader, left a comment letting us know that his Drobo had stopped working after he installed Lion. Since performing the Lion upgrade, the Drobo Dashboard remains stuck on the message “Looking for connected devices” and never connects to the NAS. Casey sent the following screenshot:
The Drobo fails connect after installing Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.
Casey isn’t the only person who has reported NAS issues since upgrading. Other affected NAS units include those manufactured by Western Digital, LaCie and Iomega, and users are reporting error messages such as “There was a problem connecting to the server,” “The backup disk is not available” or “The network backup disk does not support the required AFP features” when attempting to use a NAS for Time Machine after installing Lion. It seems that the issue has to do with Apple’s decision to change the authentication protocol for NAS devices, while the majority of current devices use an older version of the protocol.
Problem connecting to a LaCie NAS in Time Machine after upgrading to Lion. Courtesy of LaCie.
Drobo has released a dashboard update that should resolve this issue for current devices. However, if you connect your Drobo to an eSATA or USB 3.0 card, you may need an updated driver for the I/O card as well to resolve the issue. In addition, Drobo Gen 1 users need to wait for a forthcoming firmware update. Our reader Casey resolved his issue by moving the Drobo to a FireWire port.
If you have a LaCie NAS, the LaCie support website states that the LaCie NAS OS is not compatible with Time Machine on Mac OS X Lion and that users should downgrade to Snow Leopard. Other programs such as LaCie Desktop Manager have new versions available that are compatible with Lion.
Iomega has not released an update for StorCenter and Storage Manager to make its devices compatible with Lion, and is asking users to sign up to be notified when a fix is released. Western Digital is in a similar situation; they are currently working on firmware updates for their NAS devices, and according to reports, the issue could take weeks to fix.
Have you experienced a storage device issue since upgrading to Lion that we have not covered here? Leave a comment.
My QNAP TS-119 has been upgraded in the the Firmware to 3.4x – so I can use AFP in general (except TimeMachine). QNAP will fix the problem in a few weeks with Firmware 3.5. Synology has a Beta-Firmware that works partially (TimeMachine should work fine). Another idea is to install another Linux-Distro with Netatalk (unclear state: Open, documented ??).
In my mind is to drop the TimeMachine-Crap completely. A weekly image with SuperDuper seems to be good enough (at the moment).
It’s kind of a looser street for Apple: AppleDeveloperProgramm (compared to IBM & SUN-Java-Developement in the past and Google’s today) – MobileMe (to DropBox, GoogleMail & Calender) – Ping (compared to Pandora).
I am considering to buy an SE Xperia Neo (I still hate SONY for what they are doing) instead of an iPhone – for consistency reasons (SYNCING MAIL, CALENDER, aso).
Lion is a good step forward in OS-tech but it might be possible to get stuck in mind (and lately innbusiness) when you ignore customer needs: Open Networks – Open VPN Router – an Address Book with Mr./Mrs. – Apple can be so douchy …
Same issue here…. My DroboPro was working fine on the network until I upgraded. Now the updated Drobo Dashboard says it’s “looking for connectives devices”…. So even the updated software doesn’t resolve the problem.
The DroboPro works perfectly if connected via USB or Firewire. It’s the iSCSI network connection that is plunked.
Under Lion, Finder won’t look inside directories on my Lian Li NAS box. Finder claims I don’t have permission, but nothing I do to the permissions works. And I can get into the directories using the command line. Sigh.
my ICY Nas box 4220 will not work.
It’s just the Finder! Try to cd and ls into the NAS with the Terminal that works for my ICY NAS.
Update 10.7.1 did not fix that
All Apple would have had to do would be to communicate with third party hardware manufacturers so that they could have known that they were updating the AFP protocol and maybe the manufacturers could have had firmware updates ready at the Lion launch or shortly afterward.
Instead, they were unilateral and left the third party manufacturers to scramble… leaving the end user/customer holding the bag.