UPDATE:
The Airport Extreme runs multiple USB discs through a USB hub without any problems when I use a POWERED USB 2.0 hub. The discs are formatted HFS+ and I have no size restrictions in my transfers.

Finally.

/

UPDATE:
I have found the root cause of the instability on my set-up. Summarizing the set-up is:
Airport Extreme base station
USB hub
2 USB discs connected to the Airport Extreme via the hub
1 printer also connected to the hub

So; the problem is the USB hub.

When connecting the USB directly to the Airport Extreme base station all file copies works.

Next; is to test with a more efficient USB hub, maybe with separate power supply.

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So.. after a lot of hassle the disc is working ok. I have 2 USB discs connected to an Airport Extreme (see earlier post as well). I’ve had file closing or input-output errors and I’ve been unable to update ID3 tags through Amarok.

The ID3 tags is still somewhat unstable. The situation is ok now running a stable release of Hardy Heron and mounting through standard CIFS with iocharset=utf8 in FSTAB. The connections seems sensitive but work most of the time if I’m not stressing the disc with other tasks.

This is a great post on fixing the shut-down timeout problem that occurs with CIFS discs.

I have my music stored on a network USB disc that is hooked up to an Airport Extreme. Currently the ID3 tagging is not editable through Amarok. ID3 tagging was managable through the depricated smbfs package which was removed in Hardy Heron. Now cifs is used even if configuring smbfs in the fstab config. I’m not fully understanding the problem but my guess is there is a compatibility problem between KDE-taglib (used by Amarok to write ID3 tags to disc) and cifs.

I tried to report the issue to the Amarok team, who did not seem too keen on getting involved.

The only solution to editing ID3 tags on my MP3 files on the mounted network share through Amarok I currently have, is to work around the problem and use the old smbfs package. I tried this solution (compiling and replacing the smbfs files with the old version in Intrepid) without any success. The only solution I have so far is to go back to Ubuntu Gutsy, where there is real smbfs support.

My network share now works ok on smbfs with music even though I still have a “no response” issue when transferring some jpg files to the share. Looks like I’m not alone on this problem after googling a bit..

Update
It turns out the the ID3 editing does not work if there is something (not sure what works and not) in the Comments field. Clearing the Comments field makes the ID3 tags update on the mounted CIFS disc!

Another update
Some of my issues turns out to be due to some ID3 tags being encoded in some ISO-encoding and I’m running UTF-8. For some reason this prevents the disc write. I solved this by bringing the file to my local laptop, whipe out all tags with ID3V2 (from Synaptic) and then re-tagging with Amarok Musicbrainz and moving back the file to the collection..