Let me apologize up front, since I'm sure I'm not providing enough information in this post.  But, as I'm an unRAID newbie, and I have absolutely no idea why I'm having the problem I'm having, I simply don't know where to start.

 

I just set up my unRAID server on Thursday, and I've been trying to set up Acronis Backup and Recovery 10 to save image files to it.  At first I was just using unRAID basic, and I created a user share Backups, and tried to point Acronis to \\tower\Backups.  But, Acronis kept asking for a password, and unRAID basic doesn't seem to do any user access control.

 

So, I upgraded to unRAID Pro, and turned share security to "user level".  I created a user, "acronis" on my unRAID server (with a password), and then I tried to point Acronis to the Backups folder using the acronis username and password.  But, Acronis still won't connect.  It keeps telling me I'm not providing the correct username/password.

 

I don't know if this is an unRAID problem or an Acronis one.  Acronis is able to connect to any other smb shares on other computers on my network without any problems.  But, at the same time, everything other than Acronis seems to work with the unRAID shares.

 

I'm about ready to rip my hair out on this one.  Does anyone have any ideas how to troubleshoot this?  The syslog doesn't have anything in it on the authentication attempts.  I'm willing to do fairly technical stuff, like some packet capturing and analysis with wireshark, if someone thinks it will help.

What if you try user shares with the username acronis but don't use a password? Just create the user with a blank password, what happens then?

Thanks for the reply.

 

I had already tried setting up a user "acronis" with a password (without any luck).  I deleted the user and created it with a blank password and it still didn't work.  I can (usually) see all the directories on the unRAID server (including subdirectories)- it's just once I try to actually set the directory in Acronis to a folder on the unRAID server I get in an endless loop where it asks me for credentials.

 

I've been doing some packet capturing in Cain & Abel while trying to set the destination directory to the unRAID server.  The results are pretty weird.  Acronis is set up to use the the username "acronis" with a blank password when accessing the destination directory.  When I browse "\\tower" from Acronis, I see in Cain that Acronis is sending 3 SMB authentication attempts in rapid succession.  The first two appear in Cain with username "@".  I'm not sure what that means.  Is that some way of saying its an anonymous attempt?

 

The third SMB authentication attempt is with username "acronis" with a blank password.  After that one goes through I see a directory list in Acronis.

 

After that things get weird and inconsistent.  If I try to browse to "\\tower\Backups" from Acronis, I see that Acronis usually first sends 2-4 more SMB authentication attempts with the "@" user, and usually 2 attempts with user "acronis".  Sometimes I see the directory listing (I have an X200 folder under Backups).  Sometimes I don't, and Acronis pops up a window to put in a username and password to access \\tower\Backups".  When I put in "acronis" with a blank password I'll see a few more "@" SMB attempts, and usually 2 "acronis" attempts.  Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.

 

It kind of seems like an issue with Acronis, except that Acronis will quite happily connect to SMB shares on other windows machines.

I faced the same problem with Acronis True Image as well! It would connect to my unarid share fine, but wouldn't accept the 'no password' share that I had setup for full read/write access. To work around it, like suggested, I had to create an account with a password too with read/write access to the share and it worked without fail. The only time I run into problems with imaging with Acronis and to my server is when my DHCP/DNS services are down and I connect to my unraid server from the Acronis True Image application. Even using the static IP of the server and assigning the client using Acronis True Image an IP, the interface stops responding at times, though I have to say, once it's imaging, it works fine.

I faced the same problem with Acronis True Image as well! It would connect to my unarid share fine, but wouldn't accept the 'no password' share that I had setup for full read/write access. To work around it, like suggested, I had to create an account with a password too with read/write access to the share and it worked without fail.

 

How specific can you get with what you did.

 

I have a user "acronis" with a password on my laptop.  In unRAID I have the user "acronis" with the same password.  From my windows 7 laptop, on my main account (named Andy), I have Acronis Backup&Recovery set up to run using "acronis" for the plan credentials.  Under "where to back up" in Backup&Recovery, I have it set up to use username "acronis" and the associated password, and am trying to point it to my unRAID server at \\tower\Backups\.  It still doesn't work for me. 

 

I also tried running Acronis Backup&Recovery under the "acronis" user account.  I have the same problem.

 

I really don't care about user level security.  Anyone on my network can access these shares for all I care.  But, I really do want to get it working.  Before I upgraded to unRAID Pro I couldn't enable user-level security.  Even then I couldn't access the unRAID server from within Acronis Backup and Recovery.

I spent a good portion of the afternoon working with Acronis on this issue.  I ended up sending them a Wireshark packet capture.  Hopefully they'll find a problem.  But, I'm pretty worried that Acronis will say this is an issue with unRAID, while Lime-Tech will say this is an issue with Backup&Recovery. 

 

Does anyone have any other ideas?

I'm still looking for a solution (or a workaround) for this problem.  I tried the anonymous users script without any luck.  Even with anonymous access granted to the Backups share, I still can't get Acronis to connect to it.

 

 

It's possible that Acronis is trying to pass \winmachine\user instead of just "user". 

With Acronis True Image 2010, it would only connect and write to my unraid share if I set a usern ame with a (or some sort of) password. I did one like you suggested like 'acronis' for the user name and 'mypassword' for the password, it accepted the share/password and then and I was able to create a disk image with those credentials and mounting my share. Must be a Acronis thing not accepting a share which doesn't have a password, just likes security I guess.

It's possible that Acronis is trying to pass \winmachine\user instead of just "user". 

 

As I said above, I ran a packet sniffer while I was trying to connect to the unRAID server.  When I pointed Acronis to \\tower\Backups\X200 and told it to use my acronis username and password, I saw 15 SMB authentication attempts go across the wire.  The first 12 were username "@" with a blank password and domain.  The 13th one was "acronis" with the proper password and a blank domain.  The 14th was my Windows username, password, and computer name.  And the 15th was "acronis" again (just like the 13th).

With Acronis True Image 2010, it would only connect and write to my unraid share if I set a usern ame with a (or some sort of) password. I did one like you suggested like 'acronis' for the user name and 'mypassword' for the password, it accepted the share/password and then and I was able to create a disk image with those credentials and mounting my share. Must be a Acronis thing not accepting a share which doesn't have a password, just likes security I guess.

 

I should try installing the TrueImage 2010 trial and see if it works in that.  It sounds like I've set things up exactly like you did, except that I'm using Backup and Recovery instead of TrueImage.

 

Out of curiosity, are you running unRAID 4.5.1 or 4.5.3?

 

I'm guessing this is an Acronis problem, but I'd like to put together enough evidence as a I can to convince them that this is a problem with their product, and not unRAID.

I'm running 4.5.1, though having said that whether it is a unraid/acronis problem, I have freenas as a file server and as a backup storage server too. The share that I have configured on freenas requires no credentials at all, all users who connect to it have full write access to it, regardless of their user account name/password so long that they mapping to it (which I've configured a network mapping as a personal/common network drive for each person to use). I realised this issue with unraid/acronis a while ago when first initially setup security on my unraid server (something I didn't have before). When I tried to dumped an image to my unraid server after the security with no password configured, acronis wouldn't like it.

I couldn't work out the reason why, so I ended up dumping the image to my freenas server temporarily. When I had time to play with this problem, I realised that I had to create a password for the user account on my unraid server, just to get acronis True Image 2010 to see and dump an image onto it. So in hindsight, it could possibility be a unraid issue, or it could be that acronis can't understand unraids Samba share security. It would be interesting to test this with a Windows-based share too with no password set on it as well to see if acronis accepts a Windows file share with no password as well.

I downloaded True Image 2010 trial and was able to get it to write to my unRAID share.  I did a Wireshark capture when I was setting it up, and saw that it didn't send all the weird SMB authentication attempts with the "@" username like Acronis Backup and Recovery did.  Though, even True Image seems kind of buggy.  I noticed it sent my Windows user login credentials automatically, instead of just the acronis username and password that I specified.  And for some reason it acted as though it wasn't saving the authentication credentials I entered (because it gave me a warning message that I hadn't entered them), but in reality it seemed to work.  Maybe Acronis hasn't quite gotten it to work correctly under Windows 7 x64.

 

I still haven't heard anything back from Acronis tech support.  I'll give them another call tomorrow if they don't email me. 

I believe when you enter the user name and password in the Authorization prompt for Acronis True Image 2010 trying to connect to a unraid share, I'm certain in that their is a tick to select 'Remember my credentials/Don't prompt me for the username/password again' or something like that. After this, you shouldn't be prompted again for that session for these credentials.

I believe when you enter the user name and password in the Authorization prompt for Acronis True Image 2010 trying to connect to a unraid share, I'm certain in that their is a tick to select 'Remember my credentials/Don't prompt me for the username/password again' or something like that. After this, you shouldn't be prompted again for that session for these credentials.

 

That's weird, because there definitely isn't anything like that showing up on my screen in True Image.  I have a tick box that says "Use NT Authentication" and that's it.  On the warning box I get a message saying that I haven't entered credentials, with a tick box to never show that message again, but that's different than what you're describing.

 

I wonder if True Image works a little differently on different operating systems.  I'm running Win7 x64 on both of the machines I've tried.  What are you running?

 

Update: Actually, I think I see what Acronis is doing (though I don't understand why its doing what its doing).  If I access a restricted share, I end up getting two windows that pop up asking me to enter a username and password.  One is the standard Windows username/password box, that you'd get if you were accessing a share in explorer, and that one does have a checkbox for remembering the password.  I also get a second window that's the Acronis "Authentication Settings" pop-up box that does not have an option for saving a username and password.

I don't believe it is OS specific. I have a full version of Acronis True Image 2010 Boot CD and I've imaged a lot of different OS's with it, from Windows XP Pro to Windows 7 Ultimate x86/x64 and VMware ESXi Server (entire disk volume including it's partitions). After I introduced security onto my unraid server with a user name and password required to write to the share, for Acronis True Image 2010 I always had to enter in the credentials and I always placed a tick for Acronis to remember this for my imaging session.  

I don't believe it is OS specific. I have a full version of Acronis True Image 2010 Boot CD and I've imaged a lot of different OS's with it, from Windows XP Pro to Windows 7 Ultimate x86/x64 and VMware ESXi Server (entire disk volume including it's partitions). After I introduced security onto my unraid server with a user name and password required to write to the share, for Acronis True Image 2010 I always had to enter in the credentials and I always placed a tick for Acronis to remember this for my imaging session.  

 

If you're making images from the boot CD then you'd be using the Linux-based operating system on the boot CD.  I don't really see why Acronis would work differently when running as an application on Win7 vs. WinXP, and it probably doesn't.  But am I am quite certain I don't get any option in the True Image application to explicitly save login credentials.

 

Out of curiosity, how did things work when you didn't use user-level security?  You to be saying that before you enabled user-level security everything just worked.  Even if I go back to simple I still can't point to the unRAID server from Acronis- it keeps asking me for access credentials.

Before I introduced user access security on my server (v4.5.1 Pro), I wasn't prompted for a user name and password, it would see my unraid network share, connect to it and dump an image on it no problems. It was after I setup user access security (worried my family members might accidentally delete files as they had full access to the network share), that I had to enter a user name and password, but when i initially set it up, I had a 'admins' user name, but no password, and Acronis True Image 2010 didn't like that it had no password to use, so to aviod this after some testing, I simply created a password for the 'admins' user name and when it prompted me for a user name/password, it would accept it and I would place a tick to accept and not prompt me for these credentials again. Maybe with the Windows installed version vs the Boot CD with the gui might have different options/layout? But it is interesting and a little weird why it just wouldn't accept my black password for the 'admins' account. Windows Explorer in XP through to 7 accepted this fine with no issues what so ever.

Well, I just got off the phone with Acronis tech support after another 2 hour session.  They definitely don't know what's causing this.  They did, however, tell me two somewhat interesting things.  First, apparently Acronis Backup and Recovery requires 4 parallel connections to the server.  I asked them what they meant by that, and why it needed 4, and they couldn't tell me.

 

Second, they claimed that acronis needed root-level permissions on the destination. They didn't like it when I told them I was using a user account with permissions to access a share.  I tried using the root username and added a password to the root account, but it still didn't work.  But, the question remains: could there be some sort of permissions problem that I'm running into?

I think when then meant 'root' access, they might of been referring to access which actually had Admin privileges, for the user shares, not actual referring to the root user account of the unraid OS (Kind of like User Level Security for the file system/system login and Network Sharing Security which Windows uses).

About the four parallel connections, Acronis might of meant to say that it requires or simulates four users accessing the share at the same instance, or uses four ports for the data packets to access the share, I don't really know either (seems that they didn't know too or their spinning yarns to confuse you ).

The bottom line for me is that with user share security enabled now, I just need to have a password set on a user name and it works for me. Perhaps you might need to try Acronis True Image 2010, but a licenced version, not sure if you've tried this, you mentioned using a trail version, which to my experience is restricted in even creating an images and other features. It is about $69 AUD to buy it, I highly recommend it, but I would understand if you felt dubious to buy it with your experiences with Acronis now.

I think when then meant 'root' access, they might of been referring to access which actually had Admin privileges, for the user shares, not actual referring to the root user account of the unraid OS (Kind of like User Level Security for the file system/system login and Network Sharing Security which Windows uses).

 

Yeah, I'm sure that's what they meant.  But even that seems ridiculous.  You shouldn't need root access when all you need to be able to do is read/write/delete files.

 

Perhaps you might need to try Acronis True Image 2010, but a licenced version, not sure if you've tried this, you mentioned using a trail version, which to my experience is restricted in even creating an images and other features. It is about $69 AUD to buy it, I highly recommend it, but I would understand if you felt dubious to buy it with your experiences with Acronis now.

 

I went with the considerably more expensive Backup and Recovery software because I read that True Image isn't so great if you want to be able to nightly/regular incremental backups, and and have old backup files automatically cleaned up.  If I would have known Backup and Recovery wasn't going to work, I probably would have went with ShadowProtect Desktop instead.

 

I've been doing some more wireshark packet captures, and I screwed up with one of my earlier conclusions.  And it makes me wonder if unRAID is the problem after all.  It turns out, Acronis isn't sending all kinds of authentication attempt with the "@" username.  Well, it does, but not in a row.  Those seemed to be getting sent when I was trying to select a destination directory using the GUI, when I was expanded the shares of the \\tower machine.  I only get one authentication attempt with the "@" username when I just type the whole path in myself.

 

But, I found one very interesting, and potentially troubling, issue with a message from the unRAID server back to my client running Acronis.  I'm no expert in the SMB protocol, but this seems to be what's going on.  When you try to access a particular SMB share (after doing the challenge-response to authenticate), the client sends a NT Create AndX Request trying to get information about that share.  The server responds with a NT Create AndX Response.  One of the things in that response is an "Access Mask".  Here's an apparently relevant snippet from the Access Mask from an unRAID share:

.... .... .... ...0 .... .... .... .... = Delete: NO delete access
.... .... .... .... .... ...0 .... .... = Write Attributes: NO write attributes access
.... .... .... .... .... .... 1... .... = Read Attributes: READ ATTRIBUTES access
.... .... .... .... .... .... .0.. .... = Delete Child: NO delete child access
.... .... .... .... .... .... ..0. .... = Execute: NO execute access
.... .... .... .... .... .... ...0 .... = Write EA: NO write extended attributes access
.... .... .... .... .... .... .... 0... = Read EA: NO read extended attributes access
.... .... .... .... .... .... .... .0.. = Append: NO append access
.... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..0. = Write: NO write access
.... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...0 = Read: NO read access

 

On a Windows share, most of these are 1 (except for Delete, and Delete Child, and Execute).  What seems particularly relevant is that Append, Write, and Read are all 1.

 

The NT Create AndX Response packet from unRAID also has a "Share Access" field, which seems to contradict the above and say that things can be read, written and deleted.

.... .... .... .... .... .... .... .1.. = Delete: Object can be shared for DELETE
.... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..1. = Write: Object can be shared for WRITE
.... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...1 = Read: Object can be shared for READ

 

The response from a Windows computer says the same thing.

 

The weird thing is, using the same username as I used in the unRAID packet capture, I certainly can create, delete, write, and read files on the share.  But maybe Acronis is somehow getting confused because of what's in the "Access Mask" field.

 

 

Whoa, you've put a lot of thought and testing into it and it seems weird that Acronis is giving you this grief. I just had an idea (might not work for your concern, but here goes). I know you can install and setup a FTP service on unraid, and I believe Acronis True Image can map to a FTP share and dump an image to a FTP server. You might want to try this just to keep Acronis happy without this authentication problems that you're facing. I don't know if you'd like to try it, but worth a think about.

Whoa, you've put a lot of thought and testing into it and it seems weird that Acronis is giving you this grief.

 

My job at least loosely involves looking at protocols, so this isn't completely outside my area of expertise (but, its not a perfect match either).  Though, this is certainly the first time I've looked at SMB very closely.  I usually do more with crypto protocols, and usually at a higher level of abstraction.

 

I've certainly spent a bunch of time on this.  I'm probably spent around 15 hours thus far, and I don't expect to have this resolved anytime soon.  I didn't have a spare computer to use as an unRAID server, so I just went out and bought a whole new computer.  So, I spent around $1200 on hardware/software for a backup solution, and it doesn't work.  I'm doing a lot of work on this because I'm pretty terrified that Lime-Tech is going to say this is a Backup&Recovery problem, while Acronis says its an unRAID problem.  And really, I still don't know which one is broken, so I don't really know who I should be bugging about this.

 

In hindsight I really shouldn't have bought a Pro license, particularly when I knew I didn't have unRAID working with the software I wanted to use.  But I thought I needed to turn on user-level security to get this working.  So, the problems with Acronis actually caused me to buy a Pro license sooner than I originally planned (I just have 3 drives in there right now, so basic was fine).  I might have to switch to WHS if I can't get this working.

 

I just had an idea (might not work for your concern, but here goes). I know you can install and setup a FTP service on unraid, and I believe Acronis True Image can map to a FTP share and dump an image to a FTP server. You might want to try this just to keep Acronis happy without this authentication problems that you're facing. I don't know if you'd like to try it, but worth a think about.

 

That's a good idea that I explored a little bit.  One of the troubleshooting things I did was run a Nessus scan on my unRAID server.  That's mainly a security scanner, but it gives you some basic informative stuff too, and it was easy enough to do.  I found that unRAID 4.5.3 already has an FTP server installed and running by default (and Nessus told me the username and password, since it was the default).  So, I was gong to try to use it, but I found that there are a couple of big downsides to using it. First, you can't use user shares with it.  But more importantly, it just doesn't work very well.  From what I gathered from other posts on this forum, FTP support is basically broken because of unRAID's reliance on SMB for implementing access control.  I guess there are some goofy workarounds you can do to get it to kind of work, but it didn't sound pleasant.

Its sad to see that you've hit this brick wall you're facing. I wouldn't of went down the WHS path, something about trusting a Microsoft product as my primary source of backup just doesn't sit right with me. As for the wasted licence, I wouldn't see it that way. You only have three disks now and I thought four disks would of been fine for me, now (6 months later), I have eight disks (1 parity and 7 data disks).

If you're paranoid about security, I guess you'd want it on, but if you're the only person that uses your server or is the only one who accesses it, just disable user security. I know it isn't quite what you want to hear, but it seems you're going nowhere fast. I'm all at lost that you've got this problem, as I seem to be fine. I'm running v4.5.1, what version of unraid are you running? Perhaps you might need to send an email to Lime Tech Support to see if they can assist with this problem further.

FTP works perfectly fine for me.  Not 5 minutes ago I uploaded some files via ftp and all seems to be working well.