Error 913, and a fix for some older NAS devices

As many have discovered many legacy NAS devices do not support anything other than SMB1 out of the box, and are no longer supported by their manufacturers, meaning there are no firmware of software updates. With a little digging (and some Linux knowledge), I was able to upgrade my Netgear Stora (about 12 years old) from SMB1 to SMB2 and thus get it working with the new Sonos environment. I find it surprising that I had to do this, given the large number of legacy NAS devices out there used for years by many happy Sonos customers (until now), even my shiny new Macbook Air, can use SMB1 to connect to such devices. Anyway that’s another issue.

You need to have some technical Linux knowledge to do the following, it’s all done via a ssh session to the NAS.

Here’s what I did. (Big thanks to the guys at OpenStora for documenting most of this.)

1. Get root access, and enable SSH, as most of these domestic NAS units do not provide a command line interface. Details here https://sigri44.github.io/OpenStora/wiki/index_Easy_Root_Access.html

2. Install a package manager - ipkg  here https://sigri44.github.io/OpenStora/wiki/index_Installing_a_package_manager.html

3. Using the newly installed package manager you can install a version of Samba that includes SMB2 support. That package is located at at the ipkg repository and you install with /opt/bin/ipkg install http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/cs08q1armel/cross/stable/samba36_3.6.23-1_arm.ipk
4. You’ll get a message something like this upon successful install “

   The original samba version 2 config (/etc/samba/smb.conf) is no longer

   working with this version of samba.

   Please create a new samba version 3 config (/opt/etc/samba/smb.conf).

   After verify your smb.conf file, modify and execute /opt/etc/init.d/S08samba

   to activate the samba version 3.”

5. Copy the original smb.conf to the new location above, and edit the file with vi or nano and add the line “max protocol = SMB2” in the Global section (without the quotes) to force use of SMB2. Your shares should carry over from the original conf file.

6. Edit the /opt/etc/init.d/S08samba file and replace pidof with pgrep (as pidof command does not seem to exist in the Stora

7. Next you need to make a Stora user an SMB user too, so do this with your default user (whoever logged in to the SMB1 share from Sonos), by adding them as users and then giving them a password. They SMB username/password should be the same as for logging in to Stora as normal (you are just letting them use SMB too). Do this with /opt/bin/smbpasswd -a <username>

8. Next stop the existing SMB1 with killall smb, and start SMB2 with /opt/etc/init.d/S08samba

9. Now try connecting from a PC/Mac to your NAS, on a Mac use the Finder and Connect to Server option. Make sure to prefix the NAS name with smb:// to force an SMB2 connection. And hopefully you will connect successfully.

10. If you can’t connect as the specified user you may need to edit smb.conf further (beyond this article scope!)

11. If you do connect then now try adding your library to Sonos. For me this connected and started to index, but stopped after about 20 minutes. I did it 10 or more times and eventually all of my music collection magically appeared in the Sonos app.

I know this is pretty techie, but I wanted to show that it can be done, without the need to jettison either your Sonos kit or you NAS.

Ian