Yosemite Server, Clients, SMB and Error code -36
A search of these forums find many old posts about Error code -36 and file sharing. I'm writing this post to help anyone else who is currently going through troubles with this, as the problem has not gone away in current versions of the Server and client software (as of this writing, 9 July, 2015). Here's the situation in which I can reproduce the the problem.
### Clients:
a mix of Mavericks and Yosemite, a mix of WiFi and Ethernet connections, a mix of notebooks and desktops, some very new, others older (none older than 4 years).
### Server:
OS X Yosemite 10.10.3, Server 4.1 ; Mac Pro (2008); shared drive is an internal, mirrored 1TB RAID, or a Drobo S with ~9TB of storage, connected over eSata (Sonnet Tech PCIx card) — Server is providing local DNS, Open Directory, and File Sharing services only. No more than 10 people connect at any given time.
## Scenario:
My understanding is the default connection protocol for file serving on recent editions of Server.app is SMB, if your client is Mavericks or newer. When everything is left as default, when a client connects to the fileserver, they cannot save a file to the shared resource without getting this error message:
> The Finder can't complete the operation because some data in "FILENAME.fext" can't be read or written. (Error code -36)
- If you're moving a single file from, say, your desktop into the server's shared resource, you'll receive the error message, but your file will be saved properly.
- If you dragged a folder, you'll receive the error message, and the folder will be written, but it will be empty on the server's end.
- If you dragged several file simultaneously, you'll receive the error message, but only 1 file will be written to the server's end.
## Workaround
If you're in an environment where you can use AFP exclusively, and you disable SMB from all your server's shares, the problems will go away. That works here, as an all-Mac shop, but I imagine we're the exception. Also, if SMB is the new default and this doesn't work in an all-Mac shop… that's a little scary.
Please leave a comment if you're seeing a similar issue. I'd love to know if there's some other variable that's causing this to pop up for our network, but not others (judging by the lack of reports in these forums).
