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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

Sep 18, 2009 6:54 PM in response to kevin_alan

Hi

+Sorry to piggyback on your issue as I can't offer you any solace, (other than you are not alone in your problem) but maybe my symptoms may help prompt someone out there to solve both our problems as they seem similar.+

I have a similar problem, every time I try to change a print dialog option, I get the beach-ball of death for a minute or two then a message saying

*" Connection failed - The server "10.0.1.4" may not exist or it is unavailable at this time. Check the server name or IP address, check your network connection, and then try again."*

Only trouble is I don't have a server called 10.0.1.4!!!!!!!!!!! Or anything else, just an ethernet to an Airport Extreme/ADSL Router and a few USB/Firewire HDDs. I did play around with hanging a USB HDD of the end of the Airport extreme as a poor man's Time Capsule but it didn't work very well.

How can I make the machine 'forget' its previous server history and make it not look for servers that don't exist????

So far I have:-
Reinstalled the printer driver (This eror only happens when changing a setting in a print dialog box)
Reinstalled the printer
Deleted the Adobe PDF printer (but it s get put back automatically everytime)
Reset the printing system
and reinstalled Snow Leopard

- and its still there and its getting really annoying. *Please help!*

There's obviously something strange going on, why does the pinter insist on looking for a non existent server ???

Thanks in advance

Jonty

Oct 2, 2009 8:58 AM in response to kevin_alan

I was having the same issue.

I had forgotten that I had installed sleepwatcher to try to mount a share based on location (mount at home but not at work). It never worked under Leopard, so I had forgotten about it. Under Snow Leopard, looks like it started to work. The only problem was that the share I had been trying to mount is no longer on my network.

Once I deleted my .wakeup file, the error went away.

Any chance you have something similar?

Nov 8, 2009 12:18 AM in response to dramenon

I guess I will add the list of woes.. though mine IS looking for another computer that is there.. but I want it to stop looking for it

"connection failed - there was an error connecting to the server 192.168.2.11 check the server name or IP.. blah blah" now on my laptop I get the same error but with my Imac address in it's place. I won't let me "eject the shared drives, I can't log on it just cycles through this error over and over. Thought it was because one of the machines went to sleep - nope came down stairs and it had the same error. How do I "undo a network" so it doesn't look for networked computers unless I want it to?

thanks much

Jan 5, 2010 6:43 AM in response to Jonty Reason

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!!.

Feb 5, 2010 2:21 PM in response to d1n0

thanks for the tip! i had a symlink in my ~/Library/PDF Services/ to the Mailplane.app. I deleted the Mailplane application itself a long time ago, so this symlink was no longer relevant so I deleted it. It doesn't make any sense to me why this would resolve the "Connection Failed" dialogs since Mailplane would have never needed to access the network share, but I'm not complaining 🙂

+update: doh. nevermind. still getting the "Connection failed" dialog.+

Message was edited by: funkadelic415

Apr 27, 2010 3:18 AM in response to Paul Harvey

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.

Apr 27, 2010 3:22 AM in response to Walt D in LV

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.

Jun 12, 2010 1:44 AM in response to kevin_alan

I had a similar issue and it turned out to be related to Acrobat. At work we use Acrobat for doing reviews. I had previously reviewed a document on a shared drive. Acrobat had something called Adobe Synchronizer running in my login items, and this seemed to continually try and reconnect to the shared drive. Once I removed that the problem went away.

Continuous error about Connection Failed

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