Carl Hutzler’s Blog

I set-up Time Machine successfully to backup to a network attach storage device (ReadyNAS 1100) twice now and have had great reliability. But for some reason, I have been trying to do it a third time at a client site and it will not work. I have been getting errors like:

Backup failed with error: 19
Network mountpoint not owned by backupd… remounting

I looked all over the ReadyNas.com site and followed their instructions perfectly. And I searched all over the blogs and other folks are having the same issue. Some think it is permission problems and I have no doubt some people have a lack of write access to their network share. But this was not the case for me.

What I found worked was after choosing the Time Machine volume in Time Machine preferences, you have to EJECT the time machine afp share (and sparse disk image if you had it mounted) BEFORE time machine will be happy and start backing up. I think it is because initially you had the share mounted as “you”, a normal user. And when time machine runs it wants to mount the share AS THE OWNER (backupd) in some way. If the share is already mounted as “you the user”, time machine can’t mount it as itself.

So when you choose the time machine volume for backups and the time machine preference says “backup starting in 120 seconds…119 seconds…118 seconds”, just eject the time machine AFP share and it just might work for you.

When I initially upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5 I had no trouble continuing to use my Motorola V3m (Sprint) as a modem via bluetooth. But due to a hardware failure on my old MacBook Pro, I had a different experience the second time around.

This time, I had a brand new machine. It shipped with 10.4 and an upgrade disk to take you to 10.5. I did the 10.5 upgrade as a fresh install and then used the Migration Assistant to move my user directory, applications, network settings, etc from my old drive.

All seemed fine until I tried to pair my Motorola V3m again and set up my Mac to use the phone as a modem. After pairing, I tried the connection and kept getting connected to Sprint but then immediately disconnected with an error. The messages in my console were similar to this:

pppd[681] MPPE required, but MS-CHAP[v2] auth not performed.

I scoured the web and found a few people having similar issues when the upgraded to 10.5. I also saw a number of people saying they were doing just fine. I tried a few changes that people suggested to this modem script and that, but nothing seemed to work. The curious thing for me was that I knew I had used my phone as a modem under 10.5 with my old machine…..hmmm.

So I plugged my old hard drive (from the old machine) into my Mac via USB and told the Mac to boot from this drive. Even though the operating system was technically for a previous version of HW (Core Duo instead of Core2 Duo and a different graphics card), the drive booted the new machine just fine. I tried the dial-up connection to my phone and it worked just fine! So under 10.5 (actually 10.5.1 in this case) the dial-up worked without a problem So just to be sure I wasn’t crazy, I took screen shots of the bluetooth networking set-up and I booted back on the laptop’s internal drive and again tested the dial-up and it failed with the MPPE error. I compared the settins to my old drive and they all looked identical. I even compared the modem scripts and they were the same. Hmmm.

So I decided to completely re-install Leopard on the internal HDD of my new MBP. Once it was installed, I did not migrate any data and instead tried the bluetooth pairing to the phone and the dial-up modem to Sprint. It worked! I migrated my user data again from my old HDD but this time I made sure I did NOT migrate my network preferences. This time I would only migrate my data and applications.

My bluetooth as modem continues to work reliably under 10.5. Although I have not extensively tested the issue further, I believe the Migration Assistant has a small bug where in if you migrate network settings, it will somehow make your bluetooth as modem not work 100% of the time. One way to maybe prove this is if you are having this MPEE error, try creating another user account and setting up bluetooth dial-up modem under that account. I bet it will work. Not sure how to fix your primary account other than starting over with 10.5 and being careful with the migration assistant. But perhaps someone smarter will figure that out.