Finder jumps columns when browsing "column view" on SMB volumes

Hi there

We got the same problem by customers of our selfs. A lot of people are complaining about that issue in the web, however nobody seems to have an answer.

Case by our customer: OSX Server 10.6.8, and Files stored on the internal Harddrive (Raid)

User use new iMacs and MacBook Pros, all on 10.6.8. At first we connected the shared volumes over afp, tried to increase the lease time of the afp-connection, repaired the rights. Now we tried to connect wia smb and still the same

If they are just put something in the folder, and open a file quick do something and save it, no problem. But if the are working intensiv on a projekt in any folder on the shared volume, they got kicked back to the rootfolder of the volume, after it is almost impossible to reenter to this folder, to change the view from column to list doesn't make any difference.

Please this problem need to be solved, any ideas?

best regards

roman

Exact same problem here that Roman described. We have the same image in use for multiple users yet only one has the issue. Changed from SMB to AFP and back, changed from list view to column view. Sometimes you think it is fixed only to have it come back within a few minutes. I was thinking permission issues but checked the accounts and the users without issue have identical permission settings. I have seen quite a few people talking about this issue and see that it has been viewed 72 times as of my posting. No solution from Apple yet, anyone figure it out? thanks

Still no comment from anyone who might help? Is it really a unfixable problem?

I am experiencing the same issue on 16 different machines.

Happens in any view type (columns, list, etc), regardless of Finder preference settings or View settings.

As it seems there is no resolution for this issue, we might consider to upgrade to lion, however we can't, because the software we need there is not working on 10.7. We face every week complanings from our customers, this is really affeting our image. We may need to consider for a other tipe of Fileserver, as we are «scared» this will happen to another installation with Mac. So there is still Linux (Helios) or even Windows.

We are really disappointed by apple.

This is not an official fix from Apple - although I have spent about 2 hours on the phone with tech support on this issue and I've only been shuffled around from department to department on it. Currently I'm being asked to call into Enterprise Support.

However, after doing some digging, trial & error, etc. on my own, I found this to work for me.

Open a terminal, su to root and create the file nsmb.conf in the /etc directory.

Here's the contents of my nsmb.conf file that stops the jumpiness.

[default]

minauth=none

notify_off=yes

port445=netbios_only

This seems to work for me, although not 100% certain what is making work yet.

Good luck, hope this helps. If I get anywhere with Enterprise support I'll post it.

Hi WSC-mac

Sounds great if it works for us as well. Unfortunately I couldn't try it yet however on Monday I will take definitly some time for that. I will post our result here.

One question though, do I need to create this .conf on every client station, as it seems they create the mistake, or did you create the file on the Fileserver/Macserver?

Many Thanks for your effort for all of us.

greets

Roman

After a lot of further digging, I found a Novell document claiming the only thing needed to fix the issue in /etc/nsmb.conf is:

[default]

notify_off=yes

Also, this needs to be on every client machine.

Good luck.

Just like you wrote, this sh*t is working!!!

Thanks for the digging wsc, we really appreciate your work here.

have a nice one

In my case It was related to DNS issues.. go figure with 10.6 anyway what I was finding is my workstations were having trouble resolving the server. What I found was my 10.6 server was adding an entry for the Equallogic nic into dns and confusing the systems. Once I cleaned that up with the smb.conf file and a bind only statement and flushing dns my problem went away. Your situation might not be the same but the root cause was dns related so that might help troubleshoot.

This worked for us!!! Thank you for posting this. We have been trying to fix this for two weeks, tried lots of different things nothing worked Thanks again for posting this! I did a write up here:

http://www.itninja.com/blog/view/fixing-mac-finder-s-jumpyness-and-a-testimonial