NMH410 some files have become inaccessible

Question

The hardware: brand-new NMH410 with two WD 1TB drives, configured as RAID-1.
The firmware: 3.18.15.
The clients: Linux 2.6.31 kernel, Kubuntu Karmic Koala
Over the past days I've copied over my media library to the NMH410 ... so far so good.
This day I face the strange situation that I get access denied to several files in my media/music subdirectories. I can see from my Linux clients that the files exist and I can also see that they should be readable. However, whenever I try to access these files, I get access denied.
Using the flash-based browser I can access these files, copy them around, et cetera. However, if I do make copies, then I cannot access these copies either. Seems to consistently getting the wrong access rights in the NMH410.
Resetting to factory defaults did not help either. Cleared the browser cache, reloaded. Disconnected SMB clients, attached them anew ... problem still persists. Most files are accessible, quite some audio files aren't anymore.
What am I doing wrong here? I'm totally dazzled.
Message Edited by ogghead on 11-17-2009 11:44 AM

Answer 1

The router isn't involved at all as the traffic is kept inhouse and traverses just a switch; plain level 2 business, no layer 3 involved. Rebooting linux (the kernel you mean?) is not required as the CIFS is nowadays more or less run in user space, if I remember correctly. Dropping mounts cleans up. No reboot or session logout required. Even almost all software package updates, even if they are concerning system daemons and libraries, are done without any reboot. Win7 has an extremely long road to travel to come even close. I have reasons to only use Linux. In office I get paid to loose time with XP. At home I want to be effective.
Oh, and as support was stubborn to insist on windows I grabbed my office laptop with WinXP and gave it a fresh try. Guess what: same result, who could have expected? You know, SAMBA is nowadays better in terms of compatibility between different SMB/CIFS protocol, server, and client versions than microsoft itself. In fact, SAMBA servers and clients on Linux are better at working around errors in Microsofts implementations than Microsofts code. No wonder that Microsoft is not able to document SMB properly, only the SAMBA project has delivered so far.
Together with a support person we found out that the NMH 410 is slowly killing itself by assigning wrong user/group ids to inodes -- well, basically I found that out and the support then more or less agreed and acknowledged. However, Linksys has no idea why the NMH is doing this. I got the advice to backup everything to a locally attached USB disk -- the only thing that worked at this point --, then to delete all files and to copy the files back.
While the backup procedure worked successfully, copying back resulted in complete desaster which even rendered the shared without access! The NMH 410 was, for whatever reason, changing ownership of the share directories to 0/0, thus rendering access impossible to the SAMBA server process. It seems that the webserver is running under root, arrrrgh! Bad design!
The next support person told me to remove the eSATA disks and to reformat them -- he probably meant to kill any partition setup. He didn't care about that I don't have any eSATA bays and interfaces at hand and don't want to drive to a shop just to buy then in order to get the self-hanging unit to work again. After he refused to help and insisted on me having to reformat the drives outside the NMH 410 I ignored his ignorance and phoned Syslink support.
The worked better and I was quickly told to try to completely reset the unit by powering off for more than 30s, then pressing reset and powering up, yet holding reset for more than 30s. I was told this should put the unit into disk repartition/reformat mode. Tried that two times, but the NMH 410 just came up (as expected) with only some settings reset, but the file system untouched and with the wrong owner/group settings. Still no access.
It seems that the problems started when I put the NMH 410 the second day after I purchased it from RAID-0 to RAID-1 with some data already on it. Thus, I put the unit back to single disc use, which causes the file system to be generated anew. This seems to be the only way to do it; two support persons didn't know this, only the third one was aware of this method albeit he suggested the non-working 30s reset procedure.
Finally converted the disks with the fresh file system to RAID-1 ... well, still waiting for the conversion to finish. After that will have finished, I will try to restore some files from the FAT32 USB disk, using FTP as suggested (eeek!). We will see.
After all the years this is the first Linux system I have come across that it killing access to it by randomly assigning wrong user/group ownerships to inodes. This seems to have required brilliant craftmenship by Linksys to make Linux behave in such a braindead manner. My confidence in Linksys and especially this product has totally gone away. Support is awful.
Message Edited by ogghead on 11-18-2009 09:30 AM