Accessing disk on Airport Extreme

[calibre97]

Once upon a time I was able to access a share on my desktop Mac with an AFP driver or something, or at least with FTP. But that was a full computer. Now I'd like to access the drive attached to an Airport Extreme base station. I have the Samba service running, and I can see the name of the base station but nothing appears in the file manager. Is there something I need to have installed on the laptop running Mint to access the drive? Or just something to configure? I did a search for "airport access drive" and nothing appeared so I'm hoping this new topic will answer the question for me and anyone else trying to do this.

[Husse]

This would be like a NAS?
I'm not sure I know what to do here
Will ask for help

[calibre97]

I suppose for all practical purposes it's NAS. I'm guessing the sticking point is the filesystem and protocol. I think you'd need some kind of AFP client - again, I once got a connection to my desktop Mac via afp://.... in Nautilus, but I don't know what kind of extra barriers the disk being behind the Airport Extreme presents.

No need to feel too bad, though, because I don't see any straightforward way of connecting to that same disk over Windows XP either. On a Mac, it just appears under Shared when I have access to the disk configured to be "Using network password".

UPDATE: To get to it under Windows, I open My Network Places, then Entire Network, then Microsoft Windows Network, then Workgroup, THEN the name I assigned to the base station. Finally, I authenticate to the base station with a user account I created on the base station for disk access. And I'm in. Under Mint, I can see the same name for the base station, but when I click on it, I don't get asked for credentials. I just see an empty window.

UPDATE AGAIN:
OK, so now under Mint, I open the File Browser and click Network, Takes a minute to get results, but then I see Windows Network with WORKGROUP in the right pane. I double-click on WORKGROUP and then after a bit I get an error: Unable to mount location/Failed to retrieve share list from server.

I don't have a WINS server which is one of the options in the Airport config: to specify a workgroup name and a WINS server. Anyway, that's all I'm able to do at this point, so I'll await word on someone hopefully getting this to work. Barring that, I'll just have to resign myself to only having access to the shared disk when I'm at the Mac Mini I'll be getting soon. The Airport works as a wireless access point just fine, but since it is Apple proprietary, I'll have to accept the limitations regarding disk access. And before anyone suggests it, I already have this setup so I'm not going to get another consumer NAS or add another server to the network. We're 75% Mac in this house so this setup is Mostly Good Enough.

[miket]

Hi calibre97,

To access the NAS you need to install smb4k onto your Mint machine, open a terminal and type this command:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install smb4k

Then Start smb4k from the menu and it will scan the network and find the device, and then just double click it and provide the necessary user/pass
and away you go !

Mike.

I suppose for all practical purposes it's NAS. I'm guessing the sticking point is the filesystem and protocol. I think you'd need some kind of AFP client - again, I once got a connection to my desktop Mac via afp://.... in Nautilus, but I don't know what kind of extra barriers the disk being behind the Airport Extreme presents.

No need to feel too bad, though, because I don't see any straightforward way of connecting to that same disk over Windows XP either. On a Mac, it just appears under Shared when I have access to the disk configured to be "Using network password".

UPDATE: To get to it under Windows, I open My Network Places, then Entire Network, then Microsoft Windows Network, then Workgroup, THEN the name I assigned to the base station. Finally, I authenticate to the base station with a user account I created on the base station for disk access. And I'm in. Under Mint, I can see the same name for the base station, but when I click on it, I don't get asked for credentials. I just see an empty window.

UPDATE AGAIN:
OK, so now under Mint, I open the File Browser and click Network, Takes a minute to get results, but then I see Windows Network with WORKGROUP in the right pane. I double-click on WORKGROUP and then after a bit I get an error: Unable to mount location/Failed to retrieve share list from server.

I don't have a WINS server which is one of the options in the Airport config: to specify a workgroup name and a WINS server. Anyway, that's all I'm able to do at this point, so I'll await word on someone hopefully getting this to work. Barring that, I'll just have to resign myself to only having access to the shared disk when I'm at the Mac Mini I'll be getting soon. The Airport works as a wireless access point just fine, but since it is Apple proprietary, I'll have to accept the limitations regarding disk access. And before anyone suggests it, I already have this setup so I'm not going to get another consumer NAS or add another server to the network. We're 75% Mac in this house so this setup is Mostly Good Enough.

[calibre97]

And that's a negative. Only sees my own laptop. I tried setting disk sharing to be with password and with user accounts. Neither worked. SMB4K only sees my laptop.

[calibre97]

Ah, but I may be getting closer! For some reason, I see a domain name then my laptop name and for that I see the IP address is 172.n.n.n and the comment is "laptopname server (Samba, Ubuntu)". That ain't right. Only the Airport Extreme should be getting an IP address like that from the cable modem. The rest of us are supposed to be NAT'd to 10.0.1.NN.

So how do I configure the Samba server on this laptop to have the proper IP address so I can get to the share?
By the way, I tried mapping manually, with //10.0.1.1/NAME and 10.0.1.1 for IP address, but I got the same error I got when trying to mount with mount.cifs (which makes sense because I'm sure SMB4K is doing the command behind the scenes).

So that 172.n.n.n number comes from vmnet8...must be something to do with VMWare Player or maybe VirtualBox? How can I remove that IP address binding so Samba is on the 10.0.1.x net so it'll see the Airport Extreme?

**FOLLOWUP**
Goofy 172 address was indeed for VMWare Player. Uninstalled it and those vmnets are gone. BUT...smb4K still isn't letting me see the Airport Extreme. Oh well.

[miket]

Ok, so it looks like you haven't told us abut your complete setup here which would had helped us try to resolve the problem !

So, are you running Mint in VM under Vmware ?
If the machine you are trying to connect to the Aiport Extreme NAS is NAt'd on a completely different network/subnet from the NAS then it will not be able to connect
in the normal fashion as SMB/CIFs uses broadcast and thus will only see devices on it's *own* subnet, it will not go looking through the Nat'd service onto another network!

So, come clean with your complete setup and lets get an idea of what it is we are working with here.

Mike.

Ah, but I may be getting closer! For some reason, I see a domain name then my laptop name and for that I see the IP address is 172.n.n.n and the comment is "laptopname server (Samba, Ubuntu)". That ain't right. Only the Airport Extreme should be getting an IP address like that from the cable modem. The rest of us are supposed to be NAT'd to 10.0.1.NN.

So how do I configure the Samba server on this laptop to have the proper IP address so I can get to the share?
By the way, I tried mapping manually, with //10.0.1.1/NAME and 10.0.1.1 for IP address, but I got the same error I got when trying to mount with mount.cifs (which makes sense because I'm sure SMB4K is doing the command behind the scenes).

So that 172.n.n.n number comes from vmnet8...must be something to do with VMWare Player or maybe VirtualBox? How can I remove that IP address binding so Samba is on the 10.0.1.x net so it'll see the Airport Extreme?

**FOLLOWUP**
Goofy 172 address was indeed for VMWare Player. Uninstalled it and those vmnets are gone. BUT...smb4K still isn't letting me see the Airport Extreme. Oh well.

[calibre97]

There's not much to say about my setup:
Comcast cable modem gets the Internet from the Flying Spaghetti Monster and passes it to the Airport. The Airport is set to 10.0.1.1 as the DHCP server, and in its infinite wisdom parcels out numbers to all the good laptops in the house. The attached disk is shared with a disk password. I can see that disk on Windows (when I boot to it on the D630) and on a Macbook, but I get nothing on the D630 when I boot into Mint.

The VM stuff was my wondering why smb4K was thinking it had a 172.x.x.x number. Turns out it was from vmnet8 which was created by VMWare Player (for looking at Haiku). I've uninstalled VMWare Player so that's out of the picture. smb4K now sees this machine as being at 10.0.1.5, which is proper and good and pleases his noodly appendages mightily.

I still can't see that disk connected to the Airport.

[miket]

Hi !

This isn't making a lot of sense as you are able to connect from windows, which uses the SMB/NMB protocols like smb4k, so if windows can connect smb4k can too.

What happens if you get smb4k to look for the IP Address of the NAS rather than it's name ?
I think the name will fail as you probably haven't got any name service running on your LAN, so point smb4k at the IP Address of the NAS directly.

If this fails then I suggest you install the openafs-client :

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install openafs-client

Check the man pages for config options etc.

Mike.

[calibre97]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Thanks for hanging in there and trying to help Mike. Your note did in fact just help me out a bit. I think my problem was the formatting of the share value. I was trying //IPaddress/Airportname/share, or variations thereof. Your note made me realize all I had to do was give //IPaddress/share where /share is the folder name I created on the disk. I was prompted for credentials, which actually had stumped me before because I have access set to use a disk password and all I could think was, ok, yeah, so WHAT USER?!?!?! So I just now tried my regular user, the login I have on my laptop, with the disk password and POOF! There you go, I manually mounted the share.

*Edit by Forum Moderator, Keep It Clean , ya know?

[dagst47]

I think I'm a little late to this party, but here's The Solution under Mint9:

Just install smb with the software manager. Then open a "network" window... presto! You'll see (probably) Workgroup (generic) and your airport extreme's usb hard drive. Works for me anyways.

Cheers,
D