How to get a non Apple NAS to play nice with time machine

If you're like me, you have an assortment of electronics around the house and are constantly rearranging things to do stuff they weren't meant to. So here I sit with an OSX 10.5 machine and no time machine. That didn't seem right. I also happen to have just set up a dlink DNS-321 with 2x500gig drives in raid 1 for backup. Well, on my first attempt, of course, the NAS doesn't even show up on the list of available storage locations for time machine, big surprise there... So my first reaction was to go around it and use something different to get the same result. well SuperDuper looked good and does support everyday NASs but it takes some tinkering, and if I was going to tinker, I was going to get the products working the way they were meant to work which means Time Machine.

First things first, your mac won't list any random NAS it sees until you tweak it a bit, fire up your trusty terminal and enter this:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

(yes that 1 at the end is important) then hit enter.

now comes the tricky part, even though your mac should now show your NAS (you may need to restart for this to take effect) if you try to select that drive for Time Machine usage you'll get some sort of crazy error.

Next go to your system preferences and select "sharing". What does it say next to "computer name"? If your computers name is blank, has more then 8 characters, has any spaces, or symbols... change it to meet those criteria. Something short and easy is best (we will need this info later so make a note of it).

Now that your computer has a name on the network that Time machine will like, open up the terminal again and type this in:

$ ifconfig en0 | grep ether

and hit enter, the output should be the mac (physical) address of your main network card, when I first set this up, I thought I was being clever by using the mac of my wireless card since that's how this machine connects to the network but it didn't work because Time machine uses your primary network cards mac to identify the machine regardless of the fact that its not being used.

so, now that we have the name and the mac, lets get to making this work.

go to Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility and select "create image" now this part is EXTREMELY important, I can't stress that enough. The name is the most important part here. The name of your image has to be thenameofyourcomputer_themacofyourcomputer
so if your computer is called fido and the mac is 00:1a:2b:3c:4d:5e your image name would look like this:

fido_001a2b3c4d5e

no dashes or colons in there either, and name bothe the 'save as' and 'volume name' this way to be safe.

next you select the size of the image, now the size you choose should be large enough to accommodate all of the stuff you need to back up, but be aware that if you make a 200gig image, it won't take up 200 gigs on the disk until you fill it up because of the type of image we are making.

next select the pull down menu for Image format and select "sparse bundle disk image"
**you cant save the image directly to the NAS, and locally you will need enough free disk space to cover the FULL image, even though the finished product will only take up a couple hundred megs.

once the image is built, unmount it.

now copy it to the NASs root directory.

open up Time Machine and select the NAS and hopefully everything is working for you.

Some people might get an error saying "could not write to file .0061xxxxxxx", if that is your case at this point, the only workaround I've found is installing the fun plug by Fonz, once the steps to install it are taken the root user is unlocked allowing you to go into the NAS and manually grant write privileges to specific users, I don't have time right now to get into the details of that but here's the link to Fonz's info on fun plug:

http://wiki.dns323.info/howto:ffp


If anybody has questions or suggestions, please feel free to comment or send me an email. Happy hunting.

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Rob