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Continuous error about Connection Failed

Hello,

I am having a really strange issue. I just upgraded to Snow Leopard an hour or so ago and so far everything is working fine in the sense that I'm able to get on the Internet, etc...

That said, I keep getting this error over, and over and over:

Connection failed

There was an error connecting to the server "Stanley". Check the server name or IP address, and then try again.

If you are unable to resolve the problem contact your system administrator

The problem is that "Stanley" is the name of an old, old home network or external HD (I can't remember which) but hasn't been in use in quite some time. I haven't even seen any references to it at all until this happened and I can't figure out where to tell the computer to stop looking for and trying to connect to this "Stanley" server.

In Console it says this:

mount_smbfs: can't get server address: syserr = Network is down
mount_smbfs: can't get server address `STANLEY. SMB.TCP.LOCAL':
Unknown host

Any ideas?

Thanks so much,

Kevin

Macbook, Mac OS X (10.6.1)

Posted on Sep 18, 2009 3:48 PM

Reply
88 replies

Apr 27, 2012 6:21 AM in response to d1n0

This solved my PrInt Dialogie beachballing problem. The error seems to have been trigegred by me remotely opening an Application on a machine that is no longer connected. Trashing the PDF alias to this application inside:


<username>/Library/PDF Services/


solved the problem perfectly!


Thanks!


d1n0 wrote:


Hi everyone,

Just wanted to chime in - I've also had this problem and it started sometime after 10.6.
One thing I had been trying to get to work was cocoa booklet which no longer works in 10.6 - so installed it on another system which is running on 10.5.
Somehow it appears that pdf services got mixed up in this (not sure how) and kept popping that error message whenever any setting was changed on the printer.
I have no clue how this happened and after much hair pulling and grinding of teeth found how to clear it.
I emptied out the following directory
<username>/Library/PDF Services/
This folder had a cocoa booklet app that seems to be pointing to the new machine - no clue how this happened.
I deleted this and the problem disappeared.
I hope this helps anyone with the same problem as I'm running out of teeth to grind and hair to pull!!.

Jul 11, 2012 9:44 AM in response to macilvena

How do you clear your server list?


Here's my problem. I have a windows box on our network called "pc2". It shows up in my Shared area in the Finder in 10.7, but every once in a while, I will click on it to access it's shared folders and get "Connection Failed" at the top of the finder window. If I click on "Connect As..." I get the standard "There was a problem connecting to the server "pc2". The server may not exist or it is unavailable at this time. Check the server name or IP adress, check your network connection, and then try again."


Thoughts? I didn't do anything to that machine and this tends to happen every once in a while which is a pain in the butt to say the least. If I reboot either this Mac or that PC I think it will fix the issue but I don't want to be rebooting computers all day long.

Feb 24, 2013 12:21 PM in response to Ahrum Pilendiram

[I grepped my ~/Library/Preferences folder for references to the ghost server\share that was trying to be connected to at login and got the following results:


Preferences/com.apple.loginitems.plist

Preferences/com.apple.recentitems.plist

Preferences/loginwindow.plist


I trashed all the above (you may want to just rename them to be on the safe side) and the problem has gone.]


I've tolerated this annoyance for about three to four years now on my 2009 MacBook Pro unibody. Looked for an answer several times but no luck. The above worked for me. I'm very grateful. Thank you.

Mar 17, 2013 4:54 AM in response to kevin_alan

I had the same problem!

After I did everything mentioned in this post, I deleted com.apple.loginwindow.plist from system/library/logindaemons!

ATTENTION: my iMac didn't boot anymore! It took me a lot if time and effort to install lion on an usb flash drive and boot it from flash drive then copy the file back to the location. Only booting from flashdrive takes more then half hour and everything is in slow motion. DO NOT REPEAT THAT MISTAKE!


After solving the above problem I had to repair permissions and since almost one week I do not have this popup window any more!

applications/utillities/disk uttilities / sellect the hard drive and hit repair disk permissions.

For me it seems that this has worked (I hope it will not come back)

Continuous error about Connection Failed

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