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smb shares on servers inaccessible after mountain lion upgrade?

From my mini, I access some windows servers for data storage, mapping SMB. For some reason, after upgrading to Mountain Lion, I can't get to those drives (shares) any longer.


They are accessible from other computers on the network, and they are even accessible from a virtual Win7 (Fusion) session on the mini. But in the main OS X mountain lion environment on the mini, they are not accessible through any of the usual means (Finder, etc).


I even installed ForkLift and ForkLift can't get to them either.


If I go to GO -> Connect to Server, I get "There was a problem connecting to the server "192.192.192.192". (Not the real IP.)


If I use the existing entry in the list of shares I get "Connection Failed".


Needless to say, noting on the server has changed, and Mountain Lion left the shortcuts/share names/startup connection commands (which used to open the server drives when the mini started up) in tact. But actually connecting and using docs on the server, no dice.


What am I missing?

Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.7.4)

Posted on Jul 27, 2012 7:25 AM

Reply
219 replies

Jul 31, 2012 4:39 PM in response to g_pirtle

I work for a NAS vendor and we've had some customers report this issue to us. My analysis of it, so far seems to indicate that Mountain Lion is behaving differenty than Snow Leopard and Lion in the total amount of data it will accept from the SMB/CIFS server for the list of SMB shares sent to it from the SMB server. (nerd speak: I'm pulling this from the MaxDataCount field in a network trace)


  • Snow Leopard accepts 16KB
  • Lion accepts 16KB
  • Mountain Lion accepts 2KB


When the server tries responding to Mountain Lion with more than 2KB of data, it fails, because Mountain Lion has said "hey, I can only take 2KB of data for the list of shares." Mountain Lion knows that the server couldn't respond with the shares, so it goes back to the server to get the share list a different way. It uses an older method to get the share list and it seems like this is not fully supported by every SMB server out there. In particular, I know that Windows Server 2003 R2 and Samba seem to support this alternate method, but Windows 2008 R2 does not. So, for the servers that can't respond to 10.8 with the share list at all, 10.8 errors out and you see that error in your Finder when you try to connect.


My feeling here is that this 2KB limit is a bug in 10.8. I'm going to open up a bug with Apple via Radar. Maybe it'll get fixed in 10.8.1.

Jul 31, 2012 5:46 PM in response to nathan_h

nathan_h: Your options are to:

  • reduce the total number of shares you have, or the names of the shares that you have, so that the full list will fit in a 2KB reply from the server to the 10.8 client
  • use a different SMB server like 2003r2 or Samba
  • suspend use of Mountain Lion and use Snow Leopard or Lion until Apple patches Mountain Lion's SMB client.

g_pirtle: as far as I can tell, you're correct, but I'm going off of packet traces to try to infer just what Mountain Lion's doing here. That's the one thing that sticks out to me and some of my other colleagues.

Jul 31, 2012 6:02 PM in response to nathan_h

nathan_h: that sounds a bit different than what I've seen in my environment and in my tests. Your issue sounds somehow different. More investigation (like, a network trace) would be needed for me to be sure it's the same issue. There might be cause for you to try to open a case with Apple to get help, or to use the workaround of connecting directly to a share, i.e. smb://server/sharename. If the workaround doesn't work, then you're definitely seeing a different problem.

smb shares on servers inaccessible after mountain lion upgrade?

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