Accessing SMB shares on a lion machine

I have been searching for a solution to access an smb share provided FROM a lion machine (windows file sharing turned on) for a few weeks now. I held off until the 10.7.3 update came out which promised to "improve" the smb file sharing capabilities, but alas, the update did not improve my situation. I have, however, found a temporary workaround. Maybe combined with others work a solution could be found. (Other than Apple actually fixing this)

My problem is that after the 10.7.2 update I could no longer access shares from a windows machine, and I discovered that the smb daemon was not even running. No matter what I did in file sharing in system preferences would change that. I tried all combinations of restarts, shutdowns before and after turning the options on or off. I also tried many of the other suggestions in this discussion forum short of installing SAMBA3.0

Here is my workaround.

1. Turn off the checkmarks for the shares in the smb window. (enter password(s) when prompted)

2. Turn off the "Share files and folders using SMB"

3. Click "done"

4. Enter the file sharing options again and turn everything back on.

5. Launch terminal

6. Enter: smbutil view //username@127.0.0.1

7. enter your password

You should now get a listing of the shares accessible to that username. (YMMV)

(you can also type in the same command with your password, but your password is displayed in cleartext: smbutil view //username:password@127.0.0.1)

On my machine this causes the smbd process to start and I can access shares via SMB.

However, this only lasts for the current session. If I shutdown or restart; I have to go through the whole process again.