Using HP Media Smart Server and Time Machine

In a small office we have mixed Macs and Windows machines plus an HP Media Smart Server. HP provides Mac client software that allows Time Machine on the Macs to backup to the HP server. This is working fine on two Macs running snow leopard. Another Mac is running 10.5.8. The HP server is visible and accessible. Time machine Preferences even lets me try to select the HP server as the backup device. But when I make that selection, I get the error message,
"Time Machine could not be configured. The built-in network interface could not be found."
I have found a number of articles about this when I search the error message. But by and large those articles have to do with folks building their own intel based machine and then running Mac OS X. Fixes involve messing around with boot files, etc - not something I really want to do.
Does anyone have a clue what might be going on and/or how to resolve this?
thanks

Howard Cohen wrote:
I am somewhat reluctant to do that as I tend to not want to change things that I don't understand.
Good! And since that refers to a way to run OSX on non-Apple hardware (in violation of the License), it probably wouldn't apply to your situation anyway.
I don't easily find specs of this server, but if it doesn't meet the requirements set by Apple, it may not work reliably with Time Machine. See: Disks that can be used with Time Machine.
And be careful here: just because some 3rd-party hardware claims to support Time Machine doesn't necessarily mean that Apple supports it, or that it will work in all circumstances.
First, since this is *unsupported by Apple,* there's nowhere to go when there's trouble. AppleCare will refer you to HP, who will refer you to Apple.
Second, you're risking a future update preventing it from working, and perhaps rendering your backups useless.
From a post in another forum (found by V.K.):
The technical reason why Apple limits Time Machine to 10.5 AFP volumes appears to be to prevent disk image corruption. There were additional features added to AFP in 10.5 to support Time Machine. These presumably allow the disk image engine to force disk image journal data to write out all the way to the disk. Without such features, a network interruption can result in a corrupted filesystem on the disk image despite journaling. Remember, journaling relies on the journal being written all the way to disk before the changes take place. If you can't guarantee that (e.g., because of network/NAS buffering) then the journal is useless. Time Machine appears to rely heavily on disk journaling to deal with network drop-outs, interrupted backups, and the like. Take this away and your data is at risk.
If the NAS you are using supports these features it should report them to the OS and you should natively be able to choose that volume. If you have to trick the OS to use the volume it means the NAS does not support it.
To summarize: if you care about your backup data you should avoid using non-natively supported AFP servers.

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