back to article Mac Lion's breath causes Celerra NAS storage to die

When the Lion roars, Celerra bleats and plays dead. El Reg has been told there is a problem with Mac OS X Lion clients accessing the Celerra filer array. The NAS head goes offline and failover doesn't kick in. An EMC patch is available and fixes the problem. Lioness with Celerra What am I supposed to do with this then? …

COMMENTS

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  1. Mondo the Magnificent
    Coat

    Let there be light...

    ..at the end of the Lion tunnel

    Attention Adobe! Read and learn: EMC fixed this during the Beta testing phase...

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Oh dear Lord!

    Do we really need another story each time yet another bug is found in an operating system that has only just been released? Will this be done for Window, Solaris, BSD, the million odd flavours of Linux, Plan9, Amiga O/S, etc?

    1. Guy Incognito
      Mushroom

      Oh dear Lord indeed!

      It's not really an OS bug, more of an EMC bug. Call me crazy but people who are using this NAS and are considering an upgrade to Lion may wish to know this little nugget of information before updating.

    2. JarekG
      Happy

      Amiga O/S...

      hehehehe.....I like Amiga and C=64....good times...

    3. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      Oh, so it's no big deal then...

      ..that the first user in the organisation to upgrade to Lion causes the server to go down leaving hundreds if not thousands of users stuck?

      Also no big deal that the bug was known about yet not brought to the attention of customers before the release of Lion?

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Not just another bug.

      This EMC bug hit quite a few large institutions and will have had significant impact on those oprganizations that didn't have the latest patches. EMC recommend a 6-monthly update cycle so quite a few places got caught out.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not just them

    Look at all the manks on the iomega site, cos the nas dont work with Lion.

    AFAIK Lion uses a new protocol, this was all published ahead of the release, Lion beta's were available, and the nas vendors haven't caught up, one reason appears to be a dispute with licensing of a piece of software required in the nas os to support the new protocol.

  4. Bigpatc
    FAIL

    Affecting Enterprise Customers

    I know of one 5000+ company enjoying the FAIL today. How often do you patch your NAS?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not quite correct.

    The filer head failover does work as intended, the probelm is that any standby heads will also panic if they also receive Lion CIFS connections and go into a reboot loop.

    EMC did have a fix for this well in advance, however their usual advice to customers is to update the OS on these devices every 6 months or so. Any places that don't track the announcments closely and rely on the larger official release notes may have been caught out.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Why the surprise

    @Anon Co. Windows got it's share too, you just did not pay attention at the time.

  7. Jonathan White
    Stop

    well..

    Normally, bugs in OS's don't take down the server they are talking to, just the system they're running on. The fact connecting a Lion client to a NAS head and taker the thing offline for everyone - and even worse, stop it from failing over to any reserve that may be available, that's a fairly significant and unusual thing.

    1. Tom 38
      Go

      Re: well..

      You have misunderstood the issue. The issue is that a bug in the NAS's handling of the appletalk protocol that Lion uses causes the NAS to crash. The bug is clearly on the NAS, even if the bug is only exposed once exposed to Lion client.

      Appletalk support is provided by the netatalk package, which on this NAS is netatalk 2.1.x, which supports AFP 3.2. Lion uses AFP 3.3, which netatalk 2.1.x gets wrong and crashes.

  8. Martin-R
    FAIL

    Not a bug

    but a deliberate upgrade with no obvious back compatibility options. Time Machine backups to most NASs and WHS shares now fail, which is, to be blunt, bl**dy annoying!

    1. JaimieV
      Pint

      The lion's share

      For Time Machine, your NAS needs to be running an AFP 3.3 compliant firmware - which means netatalk 2.2beta2 or later. This is from March, and few NAS makers have yet included it in their firmware particularly since it's still only at beta4.

      For plain AFP shares, your NAS will still work fine.

      For passworded AFP shares, the NAS either has to include the DHX2 library with netatalk (few do but it can often be added by a technically proficient user), or users must train their Lions to use deprecated security protocols instead, eg http://www.alexanderwilde.com/2011/04/os-x-lion-connection-error-with-afp-and-workaround/

      For Windows shares, those will still work fine. Unless you're using a Celerra array without the latest patch, in which case your IT department is going to freak out massively.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Err...?

    I'm not suggesting that this isn't an EMC problem, but: How is this possible? Mac's CIFS connection is done with SAMBA, I don't notice any other implementations of SAMBA causing this behavior? What have Apple done to cause the problem, is it possible to make other SAMBA implementations behave in the same way?

    1. sadface
      FAIL

      turns out...

      apple dumped samba in Lion for their own cifs implementation. Definitely EMC's fail though - we've also seen celerra's panicked by some NFS clients in the past in our shop

  10. KroSha
    FAIL

    Not the only one

    The new AFP in Lion has caused problems with Buffalo, QNAP, Synology and the Netgear NASs. Methinks they should have been playing with the dev betas.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Synology

      Last week, Synology announced the latest version of their NAS OS (DiskStation Manager (DSM)):

      http://www.synology.com/dsm/index_dsm3.2.php?lang=enu

      They seemed particularly chuffed that they'd made its Time Machine server implementation Lion-compatible, so early - only catch is, this "new" DSM version is a beta, with all the caveats and gotchas that entails.

      So, I now have to work out whether I'm willing to risk installing a non-downgradeable beta on our Synology box, to have the option of working Time Machine backups in Lion. Having said that, I'll probably wait for a while before upgrading to Lion anyway - though some new additions in that DSM beta (LDAP, CalDAV and syslog servers, virtual ISO disk mounter) look very tempting on their own...

  11. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    whichever way you look at it ...

    Server fails due to client behaviour it can't handle. This is just plain awful - no excuses. The involvement of Lion is irrelevant. I have no idea whether the Lion client abides to whatever standards exist, and it doesn't even matter if it doesn't. Not talking to the client is one thing -- falling down on the job is just unforgivable.

    OK - so unforgivable is a bit harsh. Bugs happen. I made a mistake once.

    From EMC's face saving part, it comes down to when the problem was recognised and what steps were made to keep customers abreast of this.

  12. Nameless Faceless Computer User
    FAIL

    Darwin Award

    Who in their right mind upgrades to an operating system which has been been out in the wild for less than a year? If you really, really want to help Apple debug their software that's not newsworthy.

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