Samba Share Access Denied From RT-AC68P

[westmc]

I have an issue that I was hoping somebody could help me with. I recently bought a RT-AC68P. I started out with 3.0.0.4.378.4585 and it was working fine but I noticed a strange issue. I have an external HDD attached over USB 3.0 and I have daily backups scheduled to run during the day. After about a week or two of the backups running properly, I started getting sporadic access denied error messages. It would often try again a few minutes later and succeed. I had assumed it was my backup program (Acronis) since I have had issues with it in the past, but then I had the issue happen to me while trying to manually access a share on the router using Windows 7. To try and fix it, I switched to 378.52_2, but I am experiencing the same issue. I tried upping the number of concurrent users to 10 but that didn't help. My HDD is a WD Elements Desktop drive which automatically shuts down after 10 minutes of inactivity. I thought maybe that had something to do with it, so I set the router to spindown the HDD after 10 minutes so I could see in the log when this is happening but whether the drive is active or sleeping doesn't seem to have any affect. Even when I have reproduced this myself in windows, waiting about 1 full minute and trying again will work. Any ideas?

 

[ColinTaylor]

What other networking kit do you have attached to your LAN? NAS's, servers, repeaters, etc.

Assuming that you only have PC's, tablets, phones, etc., check the following settings:

USB Application > Network Place(Samba) Share / Cloud Disk > Force as Master Browser = Yes
USB Application > Network Place(Samba) Share / Cloud Disk > Set as WINS server = No
LAN > DHCP Server > WINS Server = <empty>

 

[westmc]

Thanks for the reply.

No servers or repeaters, just a number of Netgear switches connecting household electronics and a printer over wired and a few computers/phones connected over wifi.

Those settings match what I have.

 

[westmc]

I just wanted to bump this to see if anybody else had any ideas.

 

[sfx2000]

I just wanted to bump this to see if anybody else had any ideas.

Yep, don't use your router as a NAS/Samba server...

 

[westmc]

That's kind of rude. If I complained that I was having wifi issues, would you tell me to use ethernet instead?

I'm not doing anything to warrant the cost of a true NAS. I just run daily backups from a few computers. There is some type of issue with the stock firmware as well as the Merlin version. I assume that I would never get anywhere trying to report it to Asus, but since Merlin seems to care about fixing issues, I thought I would give this forum a try.

 

[ColinTaylor]

Have you tried using the USB 2 port instead?

 

[moebis]

I'm not doing anything to warrant the cost of a true NAS. I just run daily backups from a few computers. There is some type of issue with the stock firmware as well as the Merlin version. I assume that I would never get anywhere trying to report it to Asus, but since Merlin seems to care about fixing issues, I thought I would give this forum a try.

I too am having Samba issues. I have an AC56U (but I believe both of our routers are ARM based). I have entware-arm installed. But even before installing entware, my Mac would just lose the Samba connection. Clicking on the device/samba server in the finder shows the directory shares, shows I'm connected as admin but when I double-click an individual share, I get an error "The operation can’t be completed because the original item for “SHARENAME” can’t be found.". I have to either, reboot my router and mac or go into the admin console and stop/start the samba server to get into the subdirectories again. Super annoying. The other annoying thing, is that the FTP server only allows you to create and share one level deep. So I had to create a "Web" share at the root of the USB drive instead of just mapping the /opt/share/www directory, which is the only directory I need FTP access to. Then I had to edit the lighttpd config to point to /mnt/Storage/Web ....anyways. Seems like lots of issues with USB3 external drives, at least on ARM based routers. Anyone else?

EDIT: One last detail. I removed the EFI and HFS+ partitions, changed MBR then created and formatted a clean EXT4 1TB partition. I noticed that HFS is a real dog on the router, especially if it has to do a file system check. EXT4 does seem to perform really well on this router.