1/05/2013

Making Pogoplug work with OS X Mountain Lion

Samba 2 are shares not accessible from Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2
"The version of the server you are trying to connect to is not supported."

I am using Pogoplug (E02)  2.6.22.18 #81 armv5tejl + optware as my NAS and I have mounted a 1 TB NTFS drive on it, along with a 16 GB Ext3 drive to host optware. I exported these mount points using Samba. Both these drives are R/W accessible from Windows. Not from Mac. It seems that Mac OS X Lion has withdrawn support for earlier versions of Samba.

There is a workaround. NFS comes to rescue:
(The recommended package nfs-utils is not available for optware, hence I used unfs3)

bash-3.2# ipkg install unfs3 portmap

mkdir /opt/etc/unfs
touch /opt/etc/unfs/exports

Add volumes to be shared in 'exports' file; a sample file looks like this:

cat /opt/etc/unfs/exports
/mnt 192.168.1.0/10(rw,no_root_squash)

1.0/10 : Specifies the range of IPs allowed to access the exported resources.

To start:
bash-3.2# /opt/sbin/portmap
bash-3.2# /opt/sbin/unfsd -e /opt/etc/unfs/exports

To view exported volumes on Client: (192.168.1.5 is the IP of the server)

macair:~ as$ showmount -e 192.168.1.5
Exports list on 192.168.1.5:
/mnt                                192.168.1.0/24

Credits:

http://www.openstora.com/wiki/index.php?title=Installing_userland_NFS_(UNFSD)
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/Optware/Unfs3

With these settings, shared content will be read-only when accessed from Mac. (NFS works best with a central user directory... but that's an overkill on a home network). If you need to be able to modify a file, use sudo.

There is another great app called muCommander which allows you to browse different kinds of networks. Interestingly, where Mac OS X declined to mount Samba shares, muCommander worked.