Server File Sharing unstable on mac and windows network on Mavericks and OSX Server 3.0

OK I give up. It's been two months. Our office macs and network have never been so scanned, updated, and generally fussed over and still every week we experience lost server connections and locked files. The staff has lost trust in the server stability. They are saving to their desktops and back to the server at the end of the day. This is just pathetic Apple, it's the BASICS, reliable file serving! I've supported many versions of apple server for the past 14 years, at times it was tricky, but it was always reliable. Mavericks server, such a mess. This weekend I moved the office mac mini server back to Mountain Lion and Server 2.2.2. I'm looking forward to having an unremarkable and reliable file server again. So BASIC!

Hi Christoph,

Yes (and no), all OpenDirectory accounts are recognised in smb.conf but not the passwords, this is Samba issue, you have to sync somehow the OpenDirectory passwords into tdbsam or similar. I'm still working in a PAM configuration to sync into smbpasswd file whenever the user changes (with passwd) their password.

Other way is make samba ask for authentication in OpenDirectory via LDAP (for me this is more difficult, but can be done.)

Best regards,

Allan

I was having similar problems with my Mavericks server. After watching the problems getting worse and worse, with files being locked for no reason, spontaneous restarts, dropped connections, etc., I went out and bought a new Mac Mini Server and re-created all the accounts. I transferred the files from the old server to an external Thunderbolt drive, and started it up. It has been 99% better.

Since this is an extreme solution, and costly for most people, I think the more reasonable solution (though no less painful or time-consuming) might be to do a clean install of both the OS and Server app on machines having the problems described in this thread.

There have been some odd problems, but where I was spending up to 2-4 hours a day on server-issues, it is now down to 30-45 minutes a week.

I still do get the "File system does not support 0X40000, file attrs" errors, but they seem to be inconsequential.

Hello mikelife!

Same for me - last week i switched two of my customers to Windows 2012 R2 server because of the unresolved bugs in Mavericks smb service. It is a shame for Apple that this bug is not fixed in Lion, Mountain Lion and Mavericks.

At the moment I am playing around with Yosemite and it seams to be a lot more stable, but still has to be proved.

Apple should stick a warning lable onto Mavericks "Do not use for production use! Do not use if you need a reliable system! Prepare for reboots and sudden denial of services!"

Bye,

Christoph

I don't think that change to Microsoft is better than any other working solution like have a Linux Samba server or even a Samba installed onto a Mac Mavericks.

Allan

Hello allangarcia_!

My customers have to use a third party product and they only support Mac or Windows operating systems. So Linux is no choice. If I could I would have taken Linux before Windows.

By the way, if you use a self compiled Samba with Mavericks you get in trouble with special characters (everything above 127) because Apple choose UTF-8 with a different coding than Windows I get in trouble with Samba and german "Umlaute" like ÄäÖöÜü - they look the same from a file share form windows and mac but if i use Samba for the Windows clients, the database application shows the "umlaute" as A" or o" and the user can not access the file anymore.

So I have to go with Mac (if it only woks) or have to use Windows.😟

bye,

Christoph

Like most others here, I foolishly went for the Server update on a Mac mini Server running Mavericks. I have only one Windows 7 machine (Accounting, of course) that is connecting to the Apple server. All other clients are Apple. The server is now at 10.9.4. I will refer to the Windows 7 client as "PC." I experience the issue as any Microsoft Office app with an open document becoming locked out of that document in about 5 to 15 minutes with an error stating that another user has the file open. This was not a problem when the server was launched. It occurred after the update as others have stated. I don't think I experience any SMB service crashes because the service load is very light.

I get the same errors as everybody else in the server log:

7/16/14 1:27:34.622 PM smbd[41145]: File system does not support 0X40000, file attrs

7/16/14 1:27:34.622 PM smbd[41145]: File system does not support 0X0 time attrs

7/16/14 1:27:34.623 PM smbd[41145]: File system does not support 0X0, size attrs

7/16/14 1:29:39.006 PM smbd[41145]: File system does not support 0X40000, file attrs

7/16/14 1:29:39.006 PM smbd[41145]: File system does not support 0X0 time attrs

7/16/14 1:29:39.006 PM smbd[41145]: File system does not support 0X0, size attrs

7/16/14 1:54:46.126 PM smbd[41145]: XPC: peer event: , ipc error: Connection invalid

I can describe what I have done:

1. Upgraded MS Office on the PC to 2013 and ran all updates: no joy

2. Created a ".TemporaryItems" folder at the top level of the share point on the server where the PC uses MS Office files with open permissions: no joy

3. Called Apple (not really useful): no joy

4. Adjusted the registry on the PC to disable OpLocks but I believe that this only applies to some of the SMB protocols at play, more on this below: no joy

The Opportunistic Locking (OppLocks) on the PC will notify other users if a file is currently in use. MS Office uses it for every file. When I adjusted the registry setting for OppLocks on the PC and then rebooted, opening the same text Excel files resulted in a warning message immediately stating that the file was open by another user. This was interesting to me because I had not restarted the SMB service on the Apple server. Therefore, the "lock" is occurring in SMB on the Apple server somehow. The file is marked as open, but not released. I then restarted the SMB service on the Apple server and the PC was able to open the same test Excel file, but after a few minutes, it became locked again. So, for me, the Opplocks setting made things worse as the user will not know what to do if he can't even open a file. Previously, the files could be opened but not saved after a few minutes. I have to go back to that so that he can at least open a file if SMB on the server decides to lock a file.

Our workaround is to work locally and save locally on the PC. When work is done, that file gets coped up to the server.

Anyone found a cure for this? I am testing Yosemite at home but have no users to test against..

No cure yet, this week I wipe my two mac mini servers and tried FreeNAS. It's working like a charm. I loose Spotlight indexing service thou. :-(... BTW, my last post with Samba workaround works, but still have some disconnecting issues.

Best regards,

Allan Garcia

Just to make sure this is kept alive

I'm having these issues since upgrading to Mavericks and a new Mac Mini server last year (This is the first time in 30 Years that I feel I should have not bought Apple hardware .. a sad - really sad day)

Anyway we are having issues using Solidworks over the network using Samba .. it seems if we keep working (don't walk away from the computer and keep using Solidworks) the files stay accessible to us ..

Once we stop working (1/2 hour or so) the files get locked up = can not save to files anymore or open the files (as they are locked - marked open on the samba side)

I get all the Attribute error messages like everybody else in the bog .... same crap....

The only way to resolve the issue for us is to restart the server (never tried to restart Samba but it sounds like that could work also)

Not sure how much longer we can do this .. probably time to get new hardware soon

I've heard there is a new OSX version coming in October ??? I'll wait for that - but if that doesn't fix it all our macs will probably go away

It's embarrassing for APPLE to have an issue as big as this to hang around for so long -

**** BY THE WAY - WE NEVER ASKED FOR FREE SERVER SOFTWARE ........THAT WAS APPLE'S IDEA ****

I sometimes wonder if Steve would have handled this different - sure seems like nobody at Apple seems to care to much about it anymore these days

Georg Kohler

Corvallis OR

I've made some progress with these issues that I would like to share here.

1. We started by deleting all sharepoints, all users and all groups, turning off File Sharing, reconfiguring it from scratch, then turning it back on. We only had 13 users at the time, so it wasn't that traumatic to do this.

2. We had been running a sharepoint within a sharepoint. Eliminating that solved some of our problems. In our case, we had one sharepoint at Hard Drive > Folder 1 and another at Hard Drive > Folder 1 > Folder 2. Our requirements had changed over time, so it was OK to just delete the sharepoint for Folder 2. If you needed to maintain separate permissions, you could probably just move Folder 2 to the top level of the drive.

3. In our case, we are accessing the server via Macs running Mavericks using AFP, and Windows 8.1 running Parallels 9, on those same Macs. The Parallels configuration was set up so that Windows shared the network connection with the Macs, and within Windows, we were accessing the server via Network:Server. We were connecting via Network:Server:Folder/Sharepoint. Now, we have added the Custom Folders in Parallels (Preferences>Options>Sharing) and we access the server via Network:psf:Server:Folder/Sharepoint. This was the final step that seems to have stopped our issues.

Since doing this, we have had no permissions issues.

I was able to get some help from the site macwindows.com. It's a useful site with what seems to be a good community of people dealing with many of the issues we are dealing with here.

Good luck, everyone!

I'm going to check out the blog at macwindows.com - from a first glance it looks like there might be "some" hope or workarounds ..

Going back to our old server is unfortunately not an option anymore - The hardware was "outdated" (G5 based I believe) and would not support the newer OS required by Filemaker ( Filemaker is actually what started the whole upgrade thing)

& we sold the hardware & server software on E-Bay

Anyway - Thanks for all replies I'll give it another shot - but I'm really approaching the end the rope here soon

It would be nice to hear once from APPLE about the status on this but I guess those days are long gone .....

In my case I'm having this strange behaviours since Mountain Lion (current hardware), I had an old server that ran Snow Leopard that haven't any issue, but my current hardware (macmini5,3) doesn't support Snow Leopard. BTW my current fileserver demand doesn't fit my old hardware, thats because I'm not running him as my current file server.

So I'm running FreeNAS in my macmini5,3 hardware with no issue for two weeks now and I'm loving, it's TOO FAST.

With 10.9.5 now out, has anyone tried testing it to see if it improves this situation?

It's meant to improve the reliability of SMB when connecting to servers. Here is hoping SMB 3.0 in Yosemite does not introduce a bunch of new problems!

About the OS X Mavericks v10.9.5 Update