Monitoring the internals of the macOS SMB daemon

Hi there,

I fear I have a fairly esoteric question, but I hope you expert sysadmins out there can help!

I'm administering a handful of macOS clients connected to a FreeBSD server via SMB3.

Mostly, everything works great, but one quirky behavior I've noticed is that if I log into a user account and try to connect to a server share via

⌘K

too quickly, the daemon responsible for the SMB3 connection doesn't work, and the connection will fail. If I wait a minute or so and try again, I'll be able to connect OK, but the volume names will have

-1

appended to them.

More specifically, the share names will appear OK within the

Select the volumes you want to mount on

"[server]":

dialogue box, but if I use

bash

in Terminal to

cd

to

/Volumes

and view the names of the mounted shares shares with

ls,

there are "shadow" volumes with the proper names of the shares that are totally empty, and there are volumes that are successfully mounted with the data I expect, but those volume names have

-1

appended to them.

It seems that, somehow, when first attempting to mount the share without the SMB daemon fully up and running, the correct share name can't mount, but the name of the share gets assigned somewhere within macOS. Then, when enough time has passed to allow the daemon to get completely up and running, the share can properly be mounted, but the volume name gets

-1

appended to it to avoid collision.

This is a problem because I'm using the server to store assorted media files for video post-production. The media referenced within projects in Adobe Premiere Pro or Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve become offline, since the paths to all the files have changed.

One workaround is to just relink the media to the volume with

-1

appended, but that's inconsistent, because later, if I mount the volume properly without the -1, I'd just have to relink again. That's not ideal.

My other option is just to reboot the entire computer, log into a user account and wait a few minutes, longer than I need to, just to be sure that the SMB daemon is up and running and will mount the share as a volume without the -1.

What I'd love is to have some way to monitor the internals of the SMB daemon so that I can tell when it's safe to mount a share without failing and/or mounting with -1 appended. Does anyone know of a way to do that?