Can not connect to SMB network drive

Question

Level 1

8 points

Can not connect to SMB network drive

After upgrading to Lion, I am not able to connect to my Buffalo Terastation NAS box through SMB or AFP. After some research on various boards, it appears that the samba implementation changed in Lion and will require an update to your NAS box firmware to get it to work. Since this is not possible for the vast majority of customers (lack of vendor support, end customer technical ability, etc), I'm wondering if there is any official word from Apple to provide support for the previous samba implementation.

Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Aug 8, 2011 4:32 AM

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Answer 1

igirl1

Level 1

120 points

Aug 8, 2011 5:07 AM in response to mattrazzo

This might help. I have a Seagate Dockstar (Pogoplug w/samba) with attached drives connected to my network that was easily discoverable with Bonjour in Snow.

From my experience -

I got the SMB share working (sort of) in Lion 10.7

While the network hub and connected drive(s) won't automatically appear as a Connected Server, or Bonjour Computer I was able to find the Dockstar by going to -

Go/Connect to Server and then enter it's specific info - smb://fabx2d09fe (my device's actual number was different than this).

The dialog pops up for name and password - or connect as Guest. I couldn't remember if I had set these so tried Guest and was able to access/mount the drive on the desktop and sucessfully read/write to/from it.

I may have to always connect to recent servers to get the thing to mount so it's not as automatic as Bonjour in the sidebar - but it does work!

This mostly solved the issue for my needs....maybe it would work for yours?

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Answer 2

mattrazzo Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 8, 2011 5:22 AM in response to igirl1

Side Note: My apologies for a duplicate entry. When I entered the issue, the forum did not suggest anything relevant. After I submitted it, I then saw a dozen other posts. Sorry about that.

In my case, no matter if I try SMB or AFP, from the GUI or the CLI, I get “The version of the server you are trying to connect to is not supported." on the GUI or just the -5996 error code in the CLI. Basically the samba verison mismatch.

We'll see what finally resolves it, but I hopeful about installing an alternate samba installation: http://forums.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=38629

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Answer 3

etresoft

Level 9

56,290 points

Aug 8, 2011 5:45 AM in response to mattrazzo

mattrazzo wrote:

I'm wondering if there is any official word from Apple to provide support for the previous samba implementation.

Apple removed the previous samba implementation from the operating system. You can't get much more official than that.

Apple also increased the AFP security settings in Lion. Actually, that isn't quite true. They started using the newer security protocol in 2008, they only decprecated the old method in Lion. Here are instructions from Apple to connect to legacy equipment.

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Answer 4

peter^

Level 1

0 points

Nov 17, 2011 4:27 PM in response to mattrazzo

My experience is that Lion has upgraded the smb protocol stack and is using a more secure authentication procedure. I asked Apple's fine engineers for instructions on how to deprecate Lion's smb security protocol back down to Snow Leopard's level. They suggested using the following command that needs to be run in a terminal window everytime Lion boots:

sudo sysctl -w net.smb.fs.kern_deprecatePreXPServers=0

To restore the smb protocol stack back to Lion's original state either reboot or run in a terminal window:

sudo sysctl -w net.smb.fs.kern_deprecatePreXPServers=1

Peter

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Answer 5

Apr 3, 2012 8:15 PM in response to peter^

Thanks for the tip Peter, that's a life saver. I've been trying to connect to a server running Samba 2 and couldn't get it to work, and it is also apparently running a pretty old version of AFP because I couldn't connect that way either (even after enabling DHCAST128 in Terminal). I was about to try and go the XCode and MacPorts rout with Samba 3, but this did the trick. Amazing what one command line can do.

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