N8800 terrible mac support?

[platinumpt]

We were looking for a good NAS solution to suit a small office, and purchased the N8800.
It wasn't a "cheap" device, but it seemed like a good solution that fit all of our needs (dual gigabit, 8 drives, etc).

One of the reasons we were sold on it was that on paper, it seemed to be very mac friendly, supporting bonjour, AFP...

In practice though, it's absolutely shockingly difficult to use for something that is supposed to be a business-grade piece of hardware.

It doesn't show up as a "device" on the network unless you use "connect to server", I had to turn AFP off as it seems to totally ignore any of the permissions set. i.e. I've set all folders to private, and connecting via smb works fine (asks for logins, denies entry for guests). Login as a guest with AFP however.. and users just get free-reign of the whole file system.

The interface feels very cheap and not very user-friendly.

My support ticket has been unreplied to for 3 days.

Seriously regretting this purchase, it was meant to make our file storage easy, but in the time it's taking and it's unreliability, it would have been quicker and cheaper for me to setup a linux box and a RAID card.

Does anyone with a mac suffer the same sort of issues?

[platinumpt]

Just had a reply saying you cannot set folder permissions using any other service than SMB.
The whole box / manual and documentation say "safe and SECURE", and it's huge amount of supported services are plastered everywhere, but apparently it's a choice between safe and secure or free access for all?

Seriously if this was a cheapo home unit for sharing videos and music I'd understand, but for a business-level rack mountable unit, it seems baffling?

Samba doesn't even seem to work properly either on the networks with macs.

[GreenTentacle]

Yeah, thecus has setup AFP quite poorly on my N4100pro. I used the META, SYS, SSHD modules to write a little script which at boot kills the AFP processes, slips in my netatalk configuration files, and restarts the processes. Now my AFP shares are properly secured, AFP goes over TCP/IP instead of AppleTalk, and a few other niceities.

Next step is to figure out how to fix Thecus' broken bonjour implementation. I've put in a ticket a while back but no action on it from Thecus yet. No action on the ticket for the AFP "guest has full access" issue either.

Sigh. Still a great piece of hardware, and even though it's a pain I like the ability to tinker and make it work the way I want it to...

[mnmr]

Would you share the changes you've made?

I have the N5200Pro and could use some proper Mac support for it. Incredibly sucky that Thecus can get away with not fixing these things themselves, but since I now own the device I'll take any solution that actually works.

You can mail me at morten(NOSPAM)@mertner.com (strip the obvious bit).