File sharing broken on Mojave

Just a little update: what I described in my last post is still working pretty good for me. The afp connection to the HFS+ drives is very reliable. The smb connection to the APFS drive dropped once, but at least I could just simply reconnect it while the afp connection was still active. No beach ball, no Finder crashing.

So this might be worth a try for everyone having those problems. I am not sure if it makes any differene which protocol connects first, but I always connect through afp first as that article I mentioned suggested.

So on my 10.14.5 server I now permanently have smb and afp activated, no need to switch on smb only after I have established the afp connection (the article mentioned this procedure).

In case you only have an APFS drive you want to connect to and no HFS+ ones: maybe you have an old external HFS+ drive laying around somewhere that you can connect to your server via USB, just for the purpose to connect from your clients to via afp, and then after that connect to the APFS drive via smb. Maybe it really does the trick?

Thank you JaBaSc! I'm going to give this a shot as well. Wow this has been driving us crazy for 3 weeks now I think and finally found this discussion! I'm about ready to restore to 10.14.4 but I will give this afp mount and then smb mount a shot first.

Thank you for the info on your experience.

Ok I set this up last night and came in this morning and connected all my clients using afp first. I wasn't sure if every client needed to connect to the shares using afp first or only one client needed to connect with afp. So I connected every client with afp, then connected with smb and it looked like it was working. But less than an hour later the shares stopped responding. I'm going to reboot the file server and try again but it doesn't look like this is going to work for me.

@MurffTurf: Sorry to hear that it doesn’t seem to work for you. It is still working for me. My two clients are running on older OS, El Capitan and High Sierra, but I wouldn’t think that this does matter since the problem seems to lie in the server.

Did you check if both connections dropped or if the afp maybe was still active? As mentioned before, smb once in a while dropped for me but at least could easily be reconnected.

Thanks again @JaBaSc for your info! I don't think I checked if the afp connections was still active. I tried connecting using cmd+k and smb and got the message that the server couldn't be found... And my co-worker also lost his connection.

But I've restarted the file server and connected the afp first and then used the smb command and it worked right away so I'll see how long it lasts. If it keeps dropping today I'll probably try to regress to 10.14.4 tomorrow. But we'll keep trying this.

Did you connect first with afp on each client?

@MurffTurf: Most of the time only one client is connected, and I always did afp first.

I tried connecting using cmd+k and smb and got the message that the server couldn't be found... And my co-worker also lost his connection.

Hm, doesn’t sound good, I could reconnect very easy with the exact same method.

Before I tried the afp and smb connection I’m quite sure I typed in the Terminal command found in this article: https://www.cultofmac.com/516625/apples-quick-fix-macos-breaks-file-sharing/

I didn’t think it did anything because it adressed a problem in High Sierra but I thought I might mention it.

I might also add that I work more with the afp-connected volume than with the smb one and mostly just open files, sometimes move files or copy smaller files through the network connection. I don’t often have to copy large amounts of data. But whenever I did access the smb-connected volume it did work or at least could be reconnected fast and easy.

I guess I’ll do some testing and try copying larger files through smb to see if the connection stays up.

The connection has been much better since I restarted the server. I haven't disconnected again and it's been about 2-3 hours I guess. So maybe the restart helped.

I'll look into that article you sent as well. I saw terminal command yesterday that was supposed to fix a bug in 10.13.2 or around there but I haven't tried it since it seemed a little different than this problem. But I'll look at that article you sent and I'll give an update before I leave today on how things are going.

Thanks!

Our network has one iMac with Mojave and other the iMacs running High Sierra. After the iMac with Mojave was updated this week, we were unable to connect to it and access the it's files.

We found that shutting down and unplugging all of the iMacs and the router for two minutes resulted in our files sharing working again . We had to repeat the process again today. The connection is a little slower than it was before the update but it is stable.

Just to update my situation here. I've been connecting first w/ afp and then w/ smb today and that works pretty well. Still have to restart the file server some but not as much as before. I think I restarted it twice today whereas yesterday it was 4 or 5 times.

Not a great solution but it is better than the last 3 weeks! I have 7 people accessing the file server so when I have to restart it I have a hard time getting everyone connected back with afp first; it's too much to ask them to connect this way so I really need to do it for them.

Hoping for a fix from Apple soon! I reported this on the feedback link someone posted above and so did my co-worker.

I experience the exact problems as described by F.Richard on May 27, specially the strange fact that Preferences > Sharing hangs and doesn't load. This thing hangs so bad that a log out / log in cycle doesn't bring the service back. My only solution has been to do a reboot. I'm using Mojave 10.15.5 on both server and client, wired connection on server to a linksys route, wireless connection for the client. I can always ping and SSH from client to server, so TCP/IP seems to be working fine.

What worked for us!! henk137 was response from our company. I compared setup of our New Mac-Mini server which we use as video editing server (which works perfectly) with the setup of our Data server mac-mini.

The only difference I found was that the video server was running on Mac Os server 5,71 and the data server on Mac Os server 5.8. So I uninstalled Mac Os server 5.8 , did reboot, and installed Mac Os Server 5.71 and figure out! Server runs now for 28 hrs without dropping filesharing! During office hours around 20 to 30 people connected, no drops and client seem to connect also faster than before. (Last weeks we needed 5 to 6 reboots a day to get filesharing up again) , so is s server 5.8 the tumblemaker??

An update my side. After au quiet week, more file sharing drops during this week. Apparently when a client Mac using Sierra joined the server, but this time we were able to see folders but not the content. The uncheck/chek of File sharing using SMB to stop the service and restart it fixed this issue for a while I hope. No need to restart the Server itself. Hope Apple will fix the bug in the next 10.14.6, any feedback of the Beta ?

Same issue, very frustrating, had to have someone monitoring server all day and restarting, clearing share adding share, etc.

We were using mini Mac with an external ThunderBolt2 G-speed 24TB raid with TB2. Initially formatted this with APFS because at the time no one recommended otherwise. Purchased new mini Mac, went well for 2 days than same problem.

After major full disk backup, wiped and reformatted external drive and reformatted to HFS+ and our problems have gone away.

Don't think APFS likes lots of users sharing large, intensive files - in our case CAD or video. Worked OK when only 3 users but randomly lost share when the office started to fill up - 14 users total

Hope this helps

My MAC minis (3) have completely stopped sharing files reliably. Mojave his shutting down operations and I was in the process of Purchasing (5) more Minis. I put them on hold... Any word from Apple on this?

Just updating my situation here. We've been trying to connect with afp and then with smb but we have some Windows users also and they can't connect afp so we keep having file sharing lock up on us. Our setup worked fine until 10.14.5. So I saw someone reformatted their drive from APFS to HFS+ and that seemed to work. I was used in internal SSD and then and external SSD which were formatted APFS. Not sure if I can format them as HFS+.

So I decided to go back to our old Promise Thunderbolt RAID and try it since it is HFS+. I erased it, copied all the folders there that I want to share; set up the sharing with afp and smb (b/c we have the Windows users) but connecting all the macs with afp. This seems to be working. I liked the idea of using the fast internal SSD or the TB3 external SSD but neither is reliable!! Going back to this slower external RAID seems to be working though and the speed difference isn't terrible; I'll take working file sharing over speed at this point! It does mess up the permissions and I'm working through that but using spinning drives formatted as HFS+ seems to be the only thing that works for us right now.