Ventura 13.2 File Sharing broken

I don’t suspect it is the file system format but rather a typical difference in internal vs external disks and permissions. Do you have “ignore permissions” enabled on your mounted external drives? (I believe that is the default.) If so, I think you are on to what I’ve been wanting to look at but haven’t had the time— that it may be the permissions on custom icon files that are at the heart of this issue. I’m suspecting Apple made a change to their filesharing/SMB implementation to address a security concern and overlooked something in the process of that change. (Which isn’t an excuse but an explanation.)

After removing custom icons, file sharing seemed work, until it did not. Disconnecting shared volumes provokes the bouncing beachball of death. I have to reboot the miniMac server and my macBook just to get things working again. Sometimes even the Finder process ceases to run and cannot be relaunched through the Terminal. All in all, Ventura 13.2 is severely dysfunctional regarding file sharing. I looked at permissions (ALC) and could find no issues to speak of. Media sharing and Time Machine seem to operate without issues. I remind readers that up to and including Ventura 13.1, everything was purring along quite nicely.

Nonetheless, I will be downgrading to Monterey. I will not be going back to Ventura for quite a while. After 30 years in the computer business, I have never experienced such a bad upgrade as Ventura 13.2.

The sharing via explicit smb URL is still working for me, after turning off File Sharing on the host and shutting down the guest yesterday, then today restarting the guest,and turning on File Sharing on the host. (Both running macOS Ventura 13.2.)

13.2.1 has NOT solved file sharing issues for me unfortunately. I'm running an M1 Ultra Mac Studio as my main machine and I have an M1 Macbook Pro.

Today after restarting my Mac Studio I was able to access Mac Studio files from my Macbook Pro. But when I tried to connect from my Macbook Pro to an external drive that is plugged into the Mac Studio, I'm able to mount the external drive to my desktop. But when I click on it and try to access any files from the external drive, finder just says "loading" and never actually loads anything from the drive. I've also had finder completely freeze up, causing me to force quit finder. Then finder never reloads so I have to hold the power button down and restart.

All of that to say 13.2.1 does not contain the file sharing fix that I was hoping for in a MacOs update. Then again, the release notes Apple provided were extremely vague with the usual "Bug fixed and security updates".

OK, got this working with Forklift 3, except that:

(1) I never saw a window like you showed that asks for the protocol. I saw my host's name in the left column of the window, under "Shared", clicked that, and got a login dialog that asked only for my username and password. No request for protocol.

(2) Some files will not copy over from host to guest using Forklift 3 (purchased, not free copy!) -- even though they do transfer if I browse in Safari to smb://xx.xx.xx.xx (with the IP address of my host there), allow that to open in Finder with login, and simply drag the file from the now-opened window showing the host to a window in the guest.

I just spent over 2 hours on the phone with finally a very helpful Apple Senior Advisor.

We tried various options. One of them included renaming my computers so they could be seen differently on the network. Sadly it did not fix the situation.

The iMac Pro can see specific folders on computers and one external SSD drive, but nothing internal.

The Mac Pros can't see anything.

Thank God he was far more hard working and helpful than my first two advisors.

The 2nd one I got (first one today) was confrontational with me when I dared mention that someone posted about this issue in Reddit. That didn't go over well with him.

But his default response before even considering any other option was...reinstall the OS so you get a clean install.

I knew it wasn't going to work but I did it on all three of my systems.

And I was right....it didn't work.

The guy I got tonight (the 2nd one today and 3rd advisor overall) was VERY helpful, dedicated and hard working.

And he said he is going to bring it to the attention of the engineers to try to alleviate the situation.

This is purely a software issue that came from the latest OS update to Venture 13.2. It also had the same adverse affect on my MacBook Pro.

Apple really hit us with a doozy on this one.

My company's productivity is now all shot to ****.

That's where I am. I run a video production company. We have 8 externals nearly full of video 5 and 4 TB in size each. Hundreds of GB of assets and more coming in almost daily.

The only workaround that we have is to copy some assets to separate drives and then move the individual drives to the other systems, but that hampers contact with centrally stored graphics, music, etc.

I don't know how this can be a known problem for nearly 3 months and Apple engineers still not figure out and release a update to resolve this.

It's working for me. Are you using a VPN or Little Snitch, Radio Silence, or CleanMyMac or AntiVirus? These applications can and will negatively affect the operation of macOS.

I restart my Mac Studio daily with the issue never happening again.

You don't have to be "using" custom icons, they exist for many reasons. If you don't want to force restart the computer (not great for the disk), you can go to the computer acting as the server, turn off file sharing, and wait for a few minutes. The client will get kicked out. See the Reddit thread for more detail.

I found out that the sharing works well for drives that are externally connected to the computer that is sharing the files. Thus, the sharing issues appears to be specific to the internal drive that the operating system is installed. My internal drive uses APFS whereas the external drives (all SSDs) use Max OS Extended (Journaled). Hope this is helpful.

Does the unchecked drive potentially have no custom icon files? (See my reddit post on how to search a Volume for them if unaware.)

Also, are both Macs sharing the external volumes running 13.2? And intel or apple silicon models? (I currently don’t suspect the hardware is related but trying to look at all of the data.)

BTW, I’m genuinely interested in your responses, not asking just to “prove” something I already know.

Thanks for sharing your testing results. To clarify one point, without an Apple engineering team level of insight into the issue, the community is left to a much higher level of trial and error testing to look for a common cause and possible work-around(s). Your test is showing that one theory I had expressed-- that the problem with custom icons is potentially permissions based, to be not unequivocally true. However, it's not disproving that custom icons themselves are not still a part (or at the heart) of the matter. A lot of other testing is proving that to appear likely, despite some people's confusion that restarting or just removing some but not all custom icons, etc. appears to address the issue and then reporting that fix was "temporary". The devil is very much in the details and users on these and other public forums such as reddit have pretty significantly different levels of technical and diagnostic experience.

There is always the additional possibility that there is actually more than one problem happening releated to sharing and no one has quite put their finger on the differences. All in all, it's just the community of Apple users identifying a generalized common problem and possible workaround(s).

I had to add an additional step to the procedure you (wicker) detail, and that was to wait 15 hours. I was very frustrated with a refurb-but-new-to-me M1 Mini and new M2 MacBook Air. I went to bed very frustrated, but the next afternoon everything was working well, bi-directional file sharing from internal or external volumes.