Sambal

So, Drobo went out of business, so I’m in the market for a new NAS.

In the meantime, I stumbled across a config change that made the Time Machine partition functional as a backup target. (I created a Time Machine partition when I first got the the Drobo, but it has never worked properly until now.)

TLDR: ssh into your Drobo and add these lines to the /etc/samba/smb.conf global section; then restart smbd.

durable handles = yes
kernel oplocks = no
kernel share modes = no
posix locking = no

(If you have no way of logging into your Drobo, because the shutdown of Drobo.com bricked admin mode and you didn’t have the good fortune/foresight to enable sshd first, then you might be hosed.)

Long version https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12380#c22 , because the updated version of SMBd will never be shipped for Drobo, you can’t use the syntactic sugar described towards the end of the post.