I have always had the odd server dropout but have lived with it.

It has now become a real issue with dropouts happening too frequently.

I had to abandon my Time Machine backups as a result of many dropouts in the course of a backup.

Other than this, everything seems fine.

On checking the system log I see no record of any problems so am stuck.

Any ideas please?

Diagnostics attached.

tower-diagnostics-20250824-1104.zip

double check and try a different network cable. a break in the line or a kink can cause drop outs.

Thanks for the response.

I have replaced the appropriate cables but it hasn't helped.

When you say the server drops, do you mean the network drops and comes back later, or is the server crashing/hanging and you need to reboot?

My apologies.

I replied using my phone and it's not here!

The connection drops out and the server disappears from my desktop but when I look on finder it is connected and when I double click it in the finder it reconnects.

At no point does the server actually stop working as far as I can see,

Syslog shows some Samba errors, but not sure what's causing them. Also, I don't see the share.cfg file on the diags, I believe it should always exist.

Do you see it in the flash drive config folder? Also, an smb-extra.conf? The latter one may not exist.

No. Neither of those files are on the flash drive. I'll do some digging on those and investigate the Samba errors too.

Try toggling a share related setting, like Settings - Global share settings - disk shares, see if that creates the shares.cfg file, not sure if that is relevant, but that file should always exist.

So I just set the share option to yes from auto and there is now a share.cfg file on the flash drive so that's something.

It contains the following:-

# Generated settings:

shareDisk="yes"

shareUser="e"

shareUserInclude=""

shareUserExclude=""

shareUserExclusive="no"

shareSMBEnabled="yes"

shareNFSEnabled="no"

shareNFSFsid="100"

shareInitialOwner="Administrator"

shareInitialGroup="Domain Users"

shareCacheEnabled="yes"

shareCacheFloor="2000000"

shareMoverSchedule="40 3 * * *"

shareMoverLogging="no"

fuse_remember="330"

fuse_directio="auto"

fuse_useino="yes"

shareNOFILE=""

shareAvahiEnabled="yes"

shareAvahiSMBName="%h"

shareAvahiSMBModel="Xserve"

I hope that will have some effect but even if not, thank you for your help. I really appreciate it.

I don't think the issues are caused by that, but that file should exist, so worth retesting.

You are not wrong.

I'm still having dropouts.

I'm beginning to suspect the Mac is the problem.

Thanks again for your input.

Just a note to confirm that the problem was indeed Mac related, although I was unable to find any reason for the dropouts, but within a day or two the problem became much more frequent and also began to affect USB connected devices. This made Time Machine unusable once again because I had set it up on a USB disc which was disconnecting every few minutes. I had to stop taking back ups, but today, for no apparent reason, the fault has gone away and I am again able to back up to the array. I wonder if the source of this problem is Time Machine but I am at a loss to understand why it would cause a transient issue when there has been no change made to the OS.