unraid-timemachine-discovery

Makes Unraid shares exported as Yes (Time Machine) appear in macOS Time Machine's disk picker.

Why

Time Machine over SMB needs the server to advertise two mDNS services under one instance name: _smb._tcp, and _adisk._tcp naming the shares that are valid backup destinations. Unraid sets multicast dns register = No and hand-writes its own avahi service file, which emits _smb._tcp but never _adisk._tcp — so a Time Machine share is fully visible in Finder and absent from Time Machine.

This plugin reads the running Samba config, collects every share with fruit:time machine = yes, and writes the missing record to /etc/avahi/services/timemachine.service, leaving Unraid's own file alone. Both use %h, so avahi publishes them under one instance name, which is what the pairing requires. It re-runs on array start and whenever share settings change, reloading avahi only when the content actually changed. If a future Unraid release publishes _adisk._tcp itself, the plugin stands down.

Requirements

• Unraid 6.12 or newer. Developed and tested on 7.3.2.
• At least one share exported as Yes (Time Machine).
• The Mac and the server on the same subnet: mDNS does not cross subnets.

Install

Plugins → Install Plugin:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/externl/unraid-timemachine-discovery/main/timemachine-discovery.plg

Then Settings → User Utilities → Time Machine Discovery, or:

/usr/local/emhttp/plugins/timemachine-discovery/scripts/rc.timemachine-discovery status

The settings page shows what is being advertised and can turn the advertisement off, which withdraws the record. To check from a Mac, run dns-sd -B _adisk._tcp.

Build

./release.sh "What changed"          # version is today's date
./release.sh -s .1 "Fixed that"      # same-day rerun, numeric suffix

Builds the package, stamps the version and sha256 into the .plg, prepends the changelog and checks they agree. Needs Slackware's makepkg, so run it on the server or anywhere with Docker. Commit the package and the .plg together; pushing to main is what publishes.

The suffix must be numeric — PHP's version_compare reads a trailing a as "alpha" and ranks it older.

Support

Bugs and questions: GitHub issues.

License

MIT