Since Lion, the TimeMachine support on the Buffalo LinkStation LS-CHL v1.0 was broken because the new Netatalk protocol is now used in Lion TimeMachine backup process which is not compatible with the old NAS firmware’s atalk version. With such a long time passing, Buffalo only updates a few products’ firmware (including LS-CHL v2.0) to support Lion’s TimeMachine, and leaves a lot of old NAS model unsupported. And according to this thread, there WILL NOT be any official firmware updates for my LS-CHL v1.0 in the future.
However, as user boing in the previous forum thread suggested, it could be done by self installing new netatalk protocol to your old NAS device. After two days of configuring, now my old LS-CHL v1.0 could successfully backup my MBP now. Here’s the detail steps:
1) use acp_command to allow telnetd on the LinkStation device, logon to it under root user
2) ipkg update, ipkg upgrade, and then ipkg install netatalk protocol, which should be version 2.2.0-2
3) stop old default atalk service by: /etc/init.d/atalk.sh stop, and killall cnid_dbd and cnid_metad service
4) copy old /etc/atalk/*.* to /opt/etc/netatalk/, but don’t overwrite new installed uams folder (before copy, backup the new installed ones for reference if you wish)
5) remove .AppleDB .AppleDesktop .AppleDouble in the root folder under your time machine backup volume, the new cnid_dbd service will recreate these database upon the first access
6) modify file AppleVolumes.default, find the time machine backup volume line, append “options:tm” to it
7) modify AppleVolumes.default, afpd.conf, netatalk.conf to change MAC_CHINESE_SIMP to MAC_ROMAN if these ones contain such localization encoding before
7.5) because I use guest account to access NAS time machine volume, new uams_dhx2.so in afpd.conf is added but not used and tested actually, try use old firmware’s uams if logon to your network volume fails
8) start /opt/sbin/cnid_metad , /opt/sbin/atalkd and /opt/sbin/afpd service, now TimeMachine on your mac should work to connect your old friend NAS backup volume. Try do a backup first, as the Lion will update the old backup sparsebundle a bit, and you could enter into the new Time Machine with all your old data out there!
9) if you want linkstation to have boot time new afp service, modify /etc/init.d/atalk.sh, copy or create symbolic link to use new installed atalk ones
10) if TimeMachine won’t connect but prompts you “must create new backups” dialog, try this method , it takes several hours but works.
It’s a bit tedious to figure out all the configure steps after trying with several different time machine failures, but it’s not so complicated after all, requiring no recompilation or coding. It’s a REAL SHAME for Buffalo to abandon its longtime users without giving any efforts and notice.