Hi everyone,
we are working the the WD My Could EX2 as a shared file server that is accessed via afp. Since updating the OS of the client machines to macOS Catalina (10.15) there have been problems with the clients connecting to the server via the AFP network protocol.
The connectivity issues usually manifests in the client refusing to connect to the server after a couple of minutes of inactivity or when trying to access a different folder with the file manager (in our case macOS’s Finder). In order to reestablish the connection the share needs to be manually disconnected or the file manager has to be restarted.
Now I know, this could very well be a software problem that is the result of an unclean update or some ancient finder preferences conflicting with the current OS version. I also know that problems with connections to NAS are not restricted to WD products and that there have been several workarounds proposed (restarting the file manager, deleting the file manager’s preferences, restarting the client’s network services etc.).
However, I wanted to check that this isn’t a known problem before for trying to troubleshoot the client’s OS.
After some research I’ve narrowed down the possible causes of this issue to the following two:
- macOS Catalina includes a new implementation of the afp protocol that I am not aware of and that is not downward compatible. This creates a conflict between the version used by the NAS device and the client which results in the problem.
- the last firmware update from Dec 18 included some changes to the way the device handles shares and network connections that weren’t listed in the release notes and which lead to these connection issues.
Does anyone have ideas how to fix this or similar problems that were solved somehow?
