Strange file sharing issue

I have solved both these problems (inability to see subdirectory contents in file share; SoftRAID RAID 1 volumes not showing up on the Mac Pro's desktop), although some mysteries remain. I will try to explain here.

My original posting was for the subdirectory issue. I'd convinced myself that it was a permissions issue on the Mac Pro (it wasn't), and in the throes of trying to fix this non-problem I did something very foolish: I asked Mavericks to copy its boot drive permissions to all enclosed items. Unix honchos – of which I used to be one – will see the error of this. As did I, and quickly aborted the process, rebooted into the rescue partition and asked Disk Doctor (DD) to repair permissions on the boot drive – which it did.

However, this caused the SoftRAID problem, although I did not know it at the time. What was happening I expect was that DD had repaired permissions on everything it 'knew' about, but this did not seem to include third-party kernal extensions. One of these was the SoftRAID driver – hence no SoftRAID volumes on the Desktop.

Dredging up some 40-year-old Unix knowledge, I fixed this in Terminal with chown, chmod and kextload – I will spare you the gruesome details. Suffice to say that manually loading the SoftRAID driver restored its volumes to the Mac Pro's Desktop. Phew.

For reasons that I don't yet understand, this workaround does not yet survive a reboot, but is repeatable. I suspect some low-level fine tuning of kext file permissions may fix that.

(In passing I note that this seemed to be beyond the first-level abilities of OWC Support.)

The original problem – inability to see subdirectory contents in file shares on the Pro – turned out to be due to my connecting with them from the Mac Studio using the Network Radar app. This may be a bug in the app or may just be some setting, but I've not probed that yet: its developer did not respond to a previous request for information, and there does not seem to be a manual. Connecting with the shares using the Finder (command-K) caused the remote shares to behave as normal.

Thank you for thinking about this and your responses. The two issues – one caused by an app and the other by my own foolishness – have certainly exercised the little grey cells. Probably not a bad thing at my age.

A final footnote. The reason I could not mount a share from the Mac Studio (Ventura) to the Mac Pro (Monterey) is that I was trying to do so using afp. It seems more recent macOS versions only support smb. This worked.

Oh, and a bit of harmless fun: while testing screen sharing from the Pro to the Studio, I forgot that I was already sharing the Pro's screen on the Studio (the two machines share a display). The results were interesting. Sadly I couldn't work out a way to capture the very decorative result, but think 'Hall of Mirrors'.

To your first point, it makes no difference whether I'm trying to copy to the root or to my user desktop folder on the Pro.

To your second point, no, none of these.

As for Etrecheck, it requires 10.13, and so won't run on Mavericks.

It might help if I copy the message I've just sent to OWC Support. It doesn't relate to this issue other than that I 'broke' SoftRAID in trying to 'fix' the file sharing issue. See attached text.

Your comments about Dropbox noted. These files will be residues, as Dropbox is no longer supported on Mavericks.

Sample error message...

System requirements do not seem to be easily accessible. Which is the highest-numbered version that will run on OSX 10.9 please?

3.4.6 works. Here's the dump report.

Done, report attached.

Now, for some reason, the external SoftRAID RAID 1 volumes attached to the Pro wont' mount. I guess I might have to reinstall SoftRAID.

Err... thanks. But what to do?

Still trying to diagnose and fix the SoftRAID issue here, as without those drives I'm screwed.