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Upgrades Businesses Bug Apple

File Sharing Difficulties Frustrate Tiger Admins 334

Posted by Zonk from the catch-the-kitty-by-the-tail dept.
rmallico wrote in to mention a story currently running on Eweek about technical difficulties sites running Tiger are experiencing. From the article: "A number of sites running Apple's new 'Tiger' operating system are experiencing problems with SMB file sharing and authentication with Microsoft's Active Directory, Ziff Davis Internet News has learned. Although Apple Computer Inc.'s Tiger increases support for Server Message Block file sharing and Active Directory, several sources say that the Finder fails to log on to Windows and Linux Samba file servers."
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File Sharing Difficulties Frustrate Tiger Admins More

File Sharing Difficulties Frustrate Tiger Admins

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  • Oh, right, error code -36! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xiando ( 770382 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @04:36AM (#12460942) Homepage Journal
    The most interesting thing I noticed in the article was actually that the error message for the Connect to Server failure is "error code -36". A friend of mine who uses Mac OS X has always complained much about how the Mac never tells you anything about what is actually wrong, only gives you a number that is in no way useful for solving the problem. It is amazing this is still the case in Tiger, what in the world would be wrong with giving at least a tiny bit of information or just a hint of what is wrong? Even the good old Windows blue screen is more informative than "error code 4".

    • Re:Oh, right, error code -36! (Score:5, Informative)

      by FidelCatsro ( 861135 ) <fidelcatsro&gmail,com> on Saturday May 07, 2005 @04:42AM (#12460958) Journal
      Its actualy very usefull if you have a list of the error codes and what they mean.
      http://www.appleerrorcodes.com/ [appleerrorcodes.com]

      • Re:Oh, right, error code -36! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Aphrika ( 756248 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @05:06AM (#12461046)
        It is useful until you find that error -36 is written up as:

        -36 ioErr I/O error

        It'll point you in the right direction I guess, but it's by no means a definitive description of the error.

        I must admit that I'm a little baffled as to why Apple don't include better error reporting and descriptions in OSX. It is because they are still assuming these kind of errors will only be seen by techs that know what they mean, or are they still living in a world where they refuse to acknowledge that Macs do throw up the occasional message to the user?

        • Re:Oh, right, error code -36! (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07, 2005 @05:08AM (#12461053)
          IO error can not read or write to the directory . meaning it is not there , the reason for this is Apples implementation of samba on tiger requires the full path

        • Re:Oh, right, error code -36! (Score:5, Informative)

          by FidelCatsro ( 861135 ) <fidelcatsro&gmail,com> on Saturday May 07, 2005 @05:38AM (#12461129) Journal
          More info can be obtained from console.app in the Utilities directory under Applications(/Applications/utilities , or just go through the system logs from the terminal , but console.app is a rather nice time saver), its just a colection of the systems logs but its rather usefull and searchable .
          It does give a more detailed output. for example when i try to connect to my existant SMB share it gives me
          May 7 11:32:53 Xcomp kernel[0]: netsmb_dev: loaded
          May 7 11:32:53 xcomp[0]: netsmb_dev: loaded
          May 7 11:35:39 xcomp[0]: smbfs_aclsflunksniff: user sid S-1-5-21-2466424394-2119469220-2469460652-2002 didnt map
          I would have given an example of the error output from the specific problem , but i am doing some work on the linux comp that runs my nfs and samba shares right now .

        • ... or are they still living in a world where they refuse to acknowledge that Macs do throw up the occasional message to the user?

          I think this is the case. Ultimately, they'll be right -- there are only a few places where the Mac shows obscure error codes. Actually, file sharing is aobut it now. Prior to Tiger, you could also get obscure error messages for dropped connections, but Tiger introduces a pretty neat Network Diagnostic tool that it offers instead.

          Considering that SMB file sharing has been a

    • Yeah...0x0000005c is so much better!

    • Re:Oh, right, error code -36! (Score:5, Funny)

      by moonbender ( 547943 ) <moonbenderNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday May 07, 2005 @05:04AM (#12461038)
      Error -1, I will never forget you.

    • Re:Oh, right, error code -36! (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A friend of mine who uses Mac OS X has always complained much about how the Mac never tells you anything about what is actually wrong, only gives you a number that is in no way useful for solving the problem.

      I've seen this with SMB filesharing, Mail.app, and sometimes Safari. They've all given me frustratingly useless error messages. Anyone frustrated by this should open an Apple Developer Connection account and submit a bug report to Apple's bug tracker [apple.com]. Maybe if enough people do, they'll realize this is

    • Remember, Apple's mantra is 'Users are Idiots'. They simplify everything from the buttons on the mice to the error messages.

      Really, it's probably part of their 'Keep the UI as SIMPLE as possible' ideals. If they don't think a standard user will be able to do anything with that information, don't even bother telling them.
      • If I remember correctly (and I probably don't) the Mac OS error numbers came about because Steve Jobs was fed up with how long the original Macs took to boot, and loading the table of error numbers -> error messages was one of the things that got taken out to streamline the boot process. I guess it's just stuck.

        I seem to remember the slow booting thing was the cause of the infamous 'throwing the prototype Mac down the stairs' Steve incident, although it's even more likely that I'm wrong on that one.

      • Re:Oh, right, error code -36! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by jellomizer ( 103300 ) * on Saturday May 07, 2005 @09:26AM (#12461693)
        Well I don't agree with your idea of Apple's mantra 'Users are Idiots' I use to but it is more of mantra 'Don't make it needlessly difficult to do common tasks'

        As a programmer I will often give me error numbers because when I need to fix it the error numbers help me find it in the code quicker. And when I give more detailed error messages. The users will try to analysis my message outside of the context of my code and try to fix it them self. So if I put an error message "Out of Allocated Memory" except for error 49112, the user will go out and buy some more ram hoping it will fix the problem except for going to me and saying hey I have an error 49112 where I will know that I will need to change my code to either be more memory efficient in an area or allocate more ram.
        It is not a situation that the User is an idiot it is that they may not have the context of how things are running in the programming level. So when they see an IO error they will go trying to fix there network cards, reinstall their printers and other drivers before reporting the problem with the program.

    • Re:Oh, right, error code -36! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Megane ( 129182 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @07:06AM (#12461327)
      Those low negative number error codes date back to 1984 with the original release of the Macintosh, but usually only a few come up. When you see them with OS X, you know you've got something with roots in the old days, like the HFS file system. And then there are the larger negative numbers (usually 4 digits) from when blocks of error codes were assigned willy-nilly to stuff like the Appletalk network stack and AFP file sharing.

      And -36 doesn't help even if you know what it means, because it's just a generic "I/O error". Originally it was for media problems (like an unreadable floppy), usually accompanied by strange sounds from your disk drive, but for a network file system it's kind of silly. So even the old-timers say "yeah, that sure tells me a lot".

      Other -3x range errors include file not found (-34?), end of file (-39?), and file name too long. Another good one is -50, parameter error. Well, duuuuuuh, which parameter? What's wrong with it?

      The worst one to see is -127. That one means your file system data structures are in deep doodoo.

      But seriously, the days of 400K floppy disks are long gone. It's total laziness that nobody bothers to print a text error message along with the number. I've been doing that in my own code since the days of 800K floppies. Even printing out the ten most common error messages as text helps most of the time.

    • Well in all fairness, have anyone ever solved any Windows crash by reading a blue screen? No, the information presented there is totally useless to anyone but the person who develloped the software. And even then.

      this goes hand in hand with the concept that most "programmers" do it to impress people with their "intelligence" and "skillz", if you see a BSOD and pretend its usefull, you get extra auntie-impress points.

      There is no use telling something to the user if what you tell him has no use...
      • Yes, people can. I have myself repeatedly workarounded driver faults by seeing from the blue screen which vxd is the cause and disabling it. If I had the driver source I could also fix the error in the actual driver; I haven't done this myself but have seen it done.
      • Oh yes. Googling for the exact error message will sometimes lead to instructions on fixing the problem. Sadly, the advice is usually "run Windows Repair from the installation CD, if that doesn't work then be glad you already found your installation CD".

        The useful error messages I've seen have been from BSODs during bootup. If memory serves, you want the hexadecimal codes on the first lines.
    • Like "Fatal Exception Error 0028:C156DAD1"
    • Yup, that and the "spinning beachball of death" mouse icon that tells you the system is busy doing... er... not doing?... uh... something.

      Horrible interface decisions in an otherwise pretty good UI.

      • Re:Oh, right, error code -36! (Score:5, Informative)

        by As Seen On TV ( 857673 ) <asseen@gmail.com> on Saturday May 07, 2005 @09:46AM (#12461775)
        Actually what the spinning cursor icon means is that the program that has focus has events waiting to be processed by the run loop. That cursor appears automatically when an event waits for longer than a hard-coded threshold ... I think it's three seconds, but I doubt myself and I don't feel like looking it up right now. It would usually happen when the process was waiting for a kernel lock for some reason, usually disk or network I/O. The incidence in Tiger should drop dramatically thanks to finer-grained kernel locking.

        Admittedly this is an esoteric implementation detail. It's not really meant to communicate anything to the user other than "I'm waiting."
        • Actually, it's not just the foreground app. The wait cursor indicates that whatever app that owns the window currently under the mouse cursor has had pending, unprocessed events for over three seconds.

          You can still switch to another application. Swinging the cursor over a window of a background app that was unresponsive will give you quick feedback in the form of the wait cursor if that app is still unresponsive.

    • Re:Oh, right, error code -36! (Score:5, Funny)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @09:41AM (#12461753) Homepage Journal
      They're just pandering to the Geek crowd.

      "Oh, yeah, -36, that's an I/O Error. Check the logs, then sacrafice a pure white chicken under the full moon and pour its blood into the NT server."

      They're just trying to rope in the Geeks along with their artsy-fartsy core fanbase, with the hope that some will mate, producing a new generation of geeksy-farts ultracustomers who will be irresistably drawn to Apple's unique blend of superior design and industrial strength Unix aracana.

  • Here's a bet: (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Capt'n Hector ( 650760 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @04:38AM (#12460948)
    Whatever the issue is, my guess is Apple will have it fixed within the month. It's possible they will have a patch out by the end of next week. It's just a bug, and last time I heard, unless active measures need to be taken by network admins NOW to shore up potential security issues, bugs aren't news. Major new OS versions will always have wrinkles to iron out, stop the presses!

    • Re:Here's a bet: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by xiando ( 770382 )
      Really? "Major new OS versions will always have wrinkles to iron out, stop the presses!"? The reason for doing beta testing would be what? Is it too much to ask that vendors use beta versions of their own software in-house for a month before they release it? Is it too much to ask that they ship the software to a small number of beta testers before the final release in order to find those wrinkles and iron them out? If I were to pay for commercial software, would I be paying THEM for doing the work of beta-t

      • Re:Here's a bet: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by gullevek ( 174152 )
        I agree with you. Its super annoying that an "Gold" has these kind of errors. If it is with a super rare hardware or a super special software, okay.

        but THIS? Has nobody there ever tried to connect to a SMB sever? It's kinda strange. Annoying. Every OS has this, everyone.

        But I can imagine how this is, I can imagine this very good. The coders will say, we need to the test, the managers say, we need to release, and of course the managers are right, they get their bonus, because the release in time, and the c

      • Re:Here's a bet: (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) * on Saturday May 07, 2005 @05:15AM (#12461074)
        So, say it worked great in all beta builds until the gold master. It had been tested and came up green so in latter beta builds it wasn't tested anymore because it worked. Then say sometime between the last beta build and the GM (which are a few builds apart) a butterfly flapped its wings bug caused SMB mounting to break in Finder. Errors happen because systems are complex and there's dependancies that depend on more dependancies, a error in the chain can cause really weird errors in seemingly unrelated parts of the system.

        Your car analogy is flawed. New cars do have bugs when they roll off the lot. You would be really surprised at the number of real issues every car or every batch of cars has off the factory floor. Many times however these flaws and bugs don't crop up and cause a noticeable problem for a long time if ever. There are some problems that do crop up quickly however. It would be one thing if the manufacturer ignored this and went on its merry way. It is entirely another if they repair your car for you. I just had the dome light fixed in my car because of a faulty latch, should I be screaming about the manufacturer not having any QA? No.

        The car analogy also falls flat when compared to something as easily changed as computer software. A patch containing the repair can be very small and be distributed to millions of affected users very quickly. If your car is in the shop for a week you're out one car. If SMB shares don't show up in Finder's Browse window properly you're not out SMB shares as you can work around the problem if need be.
        • Exactly. i bought a 2002 Jeep liberty brand new.

          I took a known risk, new car model, in the first run of production.

          I have had to general recalls. First one was a wire harness hasn't really there and the controls lines for airbag deployment could get severed preventing the airbag from going off.

          The second was a poor boot cover design for the tie rods.

          I owned the car for two years and they replaced the tie-rods and put in new covers.

          Minor problems should be expected. If you buy say a Ford Taurus you

        • A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

          Sorry, couldn't resist. :)

          • Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

            The problem is when you underestimate either B or C. So X begins to approach the total cost of a recall and management thinks "hmmm... maybe we should go ahead with the recall". Only now your total cost is approaching 2x. If you had just done the recall immeadiately (the honora

        • Many times however these flaws and bugs don't crop up and cause a noticeable problem for a long time if ever.

          And many of them don't cause the vehicle to go out of control or even fail to operate. Like the wonderful paint GM used in the '90s which had a bad habit of flaking off after a few years. My old Chevy Blazer had that paint, but I didn't really care because I bought it used.

        • Re:Here's a bet: (Score:5, Insightful)

          by eraserewind ( 446891 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @07:22AM (#12461361)
          It had been tested and came up green so in latter beta builds it wasn't tested anymore because it worked.
          No offense, but what the hell sort of software engineering practice do you call that?

        • Should all new software have bugs? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by guet ( 525509 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @07:23AM (#12461363)
          Perhaps they need to do more automatic regression testing (daily) on each build then?

          I think the car analogy is (for once : ) a good one. We have come to expect failure from Software, and that shouldn't be the case - it should be very rare, not inevitable with each new release. They did rush the release of Tiger, and certain things suffered for it. Yes they will probably fix it quickly, but it'd be nice if they had a more extensive testing program, with sufficient time alllotted to do the QA work, for catching regressions like this.
        • Additionally, sometimes beta testing doesn't reveal the bugs.

          I did application development for a while in my past life, and I can't tell you how many times I fully tested a system on 3 different computers without a hitch. Then when I rolled it out to the remainder of the company, other computers simply couldn't run it as intended without me sitting down at their machines and troubleshooting.

          Part of that is I'm simply not a computer scientist and most of my programming work is. . . infantile compared to t

      • Re:Here's a bet: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by NeedleSurfer ( 768029 )
        I guess your post and the parent one will be switched when a new Windows or Linux release gets out.

        fanboys... pfffff

      • The myth of perfection (Score:3, Informative)

        by tgibbs ( 83782 )
        Is it too much to ask that vendors use beta versions of their own software in-house for a month before they release it? Is it too much to ask that they ship the software to a small number of beta testers before the final release in order to find those wrinkles and iron them out?

        This is a common complaint heard about all kinds of products from cars to drugs. What it reflects is ignorance of the statistics of testing. By necessity, testing must be done on a pool of people that is orders of magnitude small
    • If this were a windows article there would have been an almost unanimous uproar about microsoft's ability to release a stable piece of software without major bugs. Look at the nature of the bug too -- how long until somebody blames this on windows being too "monopolistic" and deliberately making it hard for tiger to share or authenticate?

      I've said it before, and I guess I'll have to say it once again -- zealotry should have no place on slashdot. If Microsoft turned around and released a perfect, bug free

      • um .. what has not being able to properly connect to a SAMBA share got to do with stability.Tiger is very very stable i have not had one OS crash (a few programs have but they were built for 10.3 and the updated version run fine)
        The fault here is in interoperability with a Microsoft SMB share (no such problem with NFS) and there is an easy work around (you just point to the share directly).

        Had this been about microsoft products not connecting to a SAMBA share properly .Then quite rightly, there would have
        • How do you point to the share directly... genuine question... I don't know OSX well.

          There's no location bar in Finder so you have to rely on the links in 'Network', but they don't work (actually it's wierd.. they work for the ADC and one other machine but none of the others).

          There's also a wierd file called 'Library' sat in my networks folder that's undeletable. Doesn't appear to do anything (another bad link, which OSX offers to 'fix' but the 'fix' brings up a file selector and I'm kinda lost at that po
          • you can do so from the top bar.
            on finder select Go from the top bar then "connect to server" to then you can just adress it like smb://*IPaddy-or-server name*/*Share-directory*/ (or you can press command+k to open up the screen then do the same) .
            You can also use samba on the command line if your more comfertable there.
            • Yeah the samba command line works (smbclient -k) but it's not as nice as browsing.

              I guess I'll have to do it manually until they fix it.
      • If Microsoft turned around and released a perfect, bug free operating system that interfaced perfectly with all the competitions' offerings, there would be a 1000 comment shitstorm of complaint as the flock of rabid posters decried them for not releasing the source, or for charging for the software.

        But the problem has been that Windows has never had a perfect release whereas Apple has had a wonderful track-record in most of their releases. [insert long tirade about security here[ [insert monopolistic p

      • Re:A typical slashdot response. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by elecngnr ( 843285 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @06:44AM (#12461273)
        I will just say at the beginning of this post that I am a fan of Apple products. I try not to jump in on every Apple story on this site because I think there is enough preaching to the choir on this site. Having said that, I will continue on this thread. I have used Windows machines for many years in addition to using Apple. The reason why there is no huge uproar, in my opinion, is because I know it wll be fixed soon. I also know that the fix will make the product better (i.e. it will NOT be SP2). It is not so much that we are brain dead followers....I would not just drink some kool aid if Steve asks me to....I think many of us have just had good experiences with their products. I upgraded to Tiger on Monday of this week. I expected some hiccups and there have been a few. However, they are not major hiccups and I do not expect to be dealing with them for long.
        • exactly correct. I've noticed a few little things with Tiger, but have complete confidence that it'll be fixed. I also submit a few bug reports because I believe they will actually make a difference.

          conversely, does anyone really think MS could give a shit about the end-users' experience? does anyone bother with the "send report" feature? when has anyone at MS made something better just for the hell of it? for example why, after probably almost a decade, is it still necessary to run disk cleanup for every

      • zealotry should have no place on slashdot

        Maybe you should change your reading preferences. I surf at 1+ and so far your post is the most extreme I've seen. The parent of yours is at 3, but I would hardly call his post "zealotry". Perhaps unsubstantiated opinion, but not "zealotry"... You post, OTOH, looks 10 times as long to go on and on about zealotry... And I'm assuming your use of 'iPOS' is a typo and not an insult or else your post would be entirely self-contradictory.

    • I mean, geez folks, it's an x.0.0 release. When has one of those ever been perfect? By anybody? I've only upgraded one of my four Macs because that one was the one I use the least, and I still had to tweak it to get what little I used it for working right, because the install overwrote a config file in /etc without even saving a backup copy.

  • Work-around (Score:5, Informative)

    by Noksagt ( 69097 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @04:49AM (#12460984) Homepage
    Easy workaround:
    Command-K to bring up the connect menu and type in the full address INCLUDING THE SHARE NAME:

    smb://SERVER/folder

    • Re:Work-around (Score:5, Informative)

      by Noksagt ( 69097 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @04:53AM (#12460994) Homepage
      Also note that you can also do it on the CLI. Open up term and do a:
      $ mount_smbfs -W workgroup //user@SERVER/folder ./mntpoint

      • Re:Work-around (Score:2, Informative)

        by teh kurisu ( 701097 )
        Doing it from the terminal using mount_smbfs seems to create an unmountable reference to the share in the Finder. Of course, it could be my own damn fault... but the Command-K method seems more reliable to me.

        • Re:Work-around (Score:2, Informative)

          by As Seen On TV ( 857673 )
          This has been changed in Tiger. In versions of Mac OS X prior to version 10.4, command-line mounts wouldn't show up in the Finder unless the disk arbitration service were manually refresh by typing "disktool -r" at the command line.

          We've changed the way filesystem events are propagated through the system in Tiger, so this is no longer necessary. Command-line mounts work just like Finder mounts now.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Work-around (Score:3, Informative)

        by phillymjs ( 234426 )
        Want to create an arbitrary share like you can under Windows? Right clicking on the directory will not help. Pretty soon you realise there's actually no easy way to do it. Apple presumably wants you to buy OS X Server for that.

        More like Apple wants all data on an OS X client machine to be somewhere in a user's folder rather than placed arbitrarily elsewhere on the drive. I have to agree with this stance-- in the pre-OS X days people would put their files wherever they wanted them (and frequently, accident

    • Re:Work-around (Score:3, Informative)

      by Tony Hoyle ( 11698 )
      Now *why* isn't that somewhere more obvious.. I spend nearly an hour looking for something like that before giving up.

      There's a lot to be said for having a location bar.

  • Opposite Experience (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 07, 2005 @04:56AM (#12461001)
    Weird, I've found with Tiger that Windows file sharing has been easier, although I don't use Active Directory. With Panther my password was never remembered by Keychain, despite clicking the option to enable it. With Tiger my password is remembered. It also finds my Windows shares automatically, whereas with Panther I had to manually connect by entering IP addresses.
    • Hmm....weird. Never had a problem with Tiger or Panther?
    • The panther-not-remembering-samba-passwords thing has been annoying the crap out of me since 10.3.0 - more for the fact that (a) I have to interface with samba and (b) my freenix friends who don't run windows AT ALL for some damned reason think Samba Is Awesome and get all >:| whenever NFS is mentioned.

      Good to know at least ONE thing about the work network is going to suck less...

  • Anecdotal... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Shag ( 3737 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @04:57AM (#12461003) Journal
    One friend indicated that things refused to work in plaintext-password mode, but once he turned on encrypted passwords, they worked fine.

    I'm not sure whether he had to turn on the encrypted passwords at the Mac end or the PC end, but I seem to recall thinking "gosh, imagine that, doing something the secure way."

  • Not sure if it's this... (Score:5, Informative)

    by mferrare ( 65039 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @05:00AM (#12461012)
    I had a problem with 10.3 authenticating to a W2k3 AD server and mounting shares. Turned out I had to modify the Domain Controller Security Policy on the server and set Microsoft Network Server: Digitally Sign Communications (always) to Disabled. I am now running 10.4 and I have no problems connecting to this w2k3 server.


    I got this solution from here [allinthehead.com] by the way. Thanks to Drew McLelland.

  • I fixed my problems (Score:4, Informative)

    by mr_zorg_mobile ( 685163 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @05:01AM (#12461022)
    I had this problem too after upgrading. I found that deleting my SMB keychain entries solved it allowed me to login again (after getting my admin to unlock my account from all those failed attempts).
  • That's strange, in my case connecting to SMB servers has improved. In Panther connections always failed 1st time, and after reentering my login & password it always connected 2nd time. This issue seems to be fixed now in Tiger, as I can always connect 1sttime.

    I do have some sympathy for apple regarding this. Anyone who uses Windows shares frequently will know that even different versions of Windows can have difficulty operating together.

    • Anyone who uses Windows shares frequently will know that even different versions of Windows can have difficulty operating together.

      "different versions"? Hey, to get "difficulties" you need to stay at least within the same major version. Otherwise, you'll need to resort to tricks like copying files via a Samba box.

  • Finder and Linux Sambda shares (Score:5, Interesting)

    by reddish ( 646830 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @05:48AM (#12461152) Homepage
    On a related note: I'm seeing really bad performance when copying a file from a Linux Samba share to my OSX machine (roughly 100 kb/sec, if that). Oddly enough, file uploads are ok (megabytes per second). Odder still, if I open a terminal and copy directly to my machine from the Samba share mount point, incoming copies are fast too. This has been going on from at least 10.2, and much to my dismay it is still an issue in 10.4. This really seems like the Finder is trying to talk Sambalese by itself (and does so differently than the SMB filesystem driver). Has anyone else noticed this behavior (and, perhaps, solved it)?
    • It's another FTFF (Fix The Fscking Finder) issue I think. Finder behaves the same way with NFS - really poor transfer rates under Finder, but normal speed using 'cp' on the command line.
    • red, I had a very similar problem under 10.3, except that I was often completely prohibited from writing to the directory through the Finder. Nobody on any forum was able to help me with this problem, although now I wonder if it's related to the resource fork issue mentioned elswhere in this discussion.
    • I had this problem too. I commented out the sockets options, and the performance problem disappeared. I did't took the time to fiddle around to determine what was the exact option that was causing the grief, but HTH.

      Cheers,

      --
      Arkan
      • Under Panther (at least), Finder doesn't like samba options such as force user or similar, which I use to reach my root mount-point on my local server.
        Finder will not be able to write files into places it thinks it can't - apparently without checking if it really is the case.
        Conversely, Finder will attempt to write into places it thinks it can, but it can't, only to fail with a somewhat weird error message.
        I don't know if this has been fixed under Tiger.
    • I found using netatalk shares works better on a linux box then using samba shares. Netatalk allows OS X to connect to the linux server using AFP 3, which in my testing was much faster than SMB. Netatalk was not that hard to setup, but I did have a problem with setting up domain authentication.
  • I just installed Tiger this week and have not yet had the opportunity to test again, but in my Panther (10.3) install I had intermittent problems trying to connect to my Debian/testing Samba shares in my office. Or rather, I could connect to them with no problem, but copying files to it via the Finder was a no-go.

    And, to be specific, this was definitely a Finder issue: I could use "cp ~/Documents/somefile.txt /Volumes/sambashare/" with no problem. But it made it very frustrating for me, and to the few ot

  • I don't use samba anymore (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sarin ( 112173 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @06:05AM (#12461198) Homepage Journal
    I used to work with samba, having a linux fileserver and a mac osx powerbook, but recently I started working with nfs. It seems a bit faster and more stable. When I change some file on the server, it's directly visible in finder - without having to refresh it.

    I also was annoyed the fact when I turned my powerbook on after it went to sleep it would give me a lot of errors about unmounting a network drive. This also was the case with tiger. With nfs, those problems are gone an nfs mount will stay active after the powerbook comes back from sleep.
    • Is there a good 'quick' start guide for setting up an NFS and print server in Linux? I'll probably be using Slackware. Some of the guides get over-my-head too quickly. I just want to setup a read/write file share and a print share and make sure noone but me (maybe password authentication and tcp_wrappers... I really don't know!) can access the share.

      It always gets complicated when security is added to the equation. Its not a simple matter, but its assumed you are a sys admin with a degree. I am not.

  • History of SMB problems with OS X (Score:5, Informative)

    by tyagiUK ( 625047 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @06:32AM (#12461249) Homepage
    I first started using OS X in the early days of 10.2 (yes, a relative latecomer). This was when my wife bought an iBook (after some *ahem* guidance... read encouragement) for studies she was undertaking. When she wasn't working on it, I got to play and set to work integrating it with our home network.

    The pain I had getting SMB to perform acceptably under 10.2 nearly put me off OS X. Basically, the way that 10.2 handled mounting network filesystems really sucked. It was unreliable and often left the system hanging with a spinning beachball (the Mac equivalent of an egg timer). Often, powering off was the only solution.

    This was fortunately fixed later on in the 10.2 lifecycle with some networking updates. Things got much better from then on.

    When I got my own iBook several months later, it arrived with 10.3. This release seemed to have a reasonably good SMB implementation, but the performance was truly sucky. File transfer speeds between the iBooks and my Linux-based Samba server were low, but at least mounting was reliable.

    As 10.3 progressed, this problem went away and performance/reliability are currently both very good. It means I can use SMB between my Linux server and both iBook and Windows XP clients. All works just fine.

    I am, however, considering a move to WebDAV for file sharing on the network. WebDAV is a nicely lightweight protocol and has the benefit of being an open standard. Most good implementations are open source too. There are also client libraries for most decent scripting/programming languages. The added benefit is that you can integrate the WebDAV server in to OS X to perform iSync backups of your system and do calendar sharing etc. All nice, geeky, stuff.

    The only major problem I can see at the moment is that the way the WebDAV server interacts with the underlying filesystem is a bit complex, given that my server runs under Apache. The model it appears to assume is that the server will have a dedicated directory or area for WebDAV files, and not simply share out a user's home directory or a backup drive.

    I do need to go and RTFM, however.
    • I haven't tested this thoroughly, but for one of our clients we activated WebDAV, mostly for future use--they were discussing adding a calendaring system to the internal use area of their website. What I noticed, is that after WebDAV was activated, each users' Sites folder had a folder called "WebDAV". Based on that, I'd say yes, WebDAV requires a dedicated directory, but that directory can and would be set-up for each users, and would be accessible through the Site's folder in the Users home Directory. Of

  • This is normal (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bones3D_mac ( 324952 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @07:16AM (#12461347)
    These kinds of things are the normal evolution of Mac OS X after each major release. Get new features and added speed as an initial tradeoff for lower stability and reliability. Anyone who has used the Mac OS since the early days of OS X should know this.

    I'm sorry, but if you are installing Tiger onto a mission-critical system, you deserve the problems you get. Give the software time to mature before rushing to employ it in your networks.

  • No Admin worth their salt installs a new OS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Beebos ( 564067 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @08:43AM (#12461564)
    If an "admin" installs a brand spanking new OS immediately after release, that admin should have his pocket protector taken away from him. Particularly if one is working in a business or other mission critical environment, installing new OS without giving time for new bugs to be discovered and addressed is a sure sign incompetance.

    • Re:No Admin worth their salt installs a new OS (Score:5, Insightful)

      by caseih ( 160668 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @01:23PM (#12462831)
      This is surely true, although Apple apparently does not think so. Recently I received two e-mails from Apple's development team regarding bug reports that I and others have filed for Panther Server regarding critical OpenLDAP bugs. In a nutshell the e-mails said, "we think the bugs don't exist in Tiger Server. Please upgrade to Tiger Server and tell us if this is the case." I was stunned. I sent them a strongly worded response to tell them that this was not acceptable. Apple just doesn't yet understand what it takes to produce Enterprise software. We need very long support lifetimes (3-5 years minimum) and upgrading major OS versions outside of normal hardware replacement cycles (with proper testing) is *never* done except in extraordinary circumstances. Right now I am very unhappy with Apple. Does anyone even know what the life expentancy of Panther Server is? What about Tiger? I can't find this information anywhere and Apple has not yet responded to my queries. Judging by the terrible LDAP problems I had with OS 10.3 (not fixed until 10.3.9!) I am in no hurry to put Tiger Server into production. I learned my lesson the hard way.

      Now that AFP support under linux is much better, I'm almost certainly going to go back to Linux for my main file servers. At least it is a known quantity.
  • Has anyone else here compared netatalk with Samba? Which one is faster and offers the least amount of hassles?

  • Wait a minute... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by catdevnull ( 531283 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @11:22AM (#12462224)
    Hey, I like Macs. I think Apple rules the roost in the OS world, etc. But hey, reality check:
    SysAdmin Rule #1: If you depend on it, and it works fine the way it is, don't mess with it. [If it ain't broke...]
    SysAdmin Rule #2: If you want to mess with it, test it before deploying it.

    Why the hell did people install a .0 release and expect that it would not be without bugs? I say if any sysadmins out there were silly enough to make a hasty upgrade before testing (ignoring the above caveats) they deserve the problems they're experiencing.

    We waited to deploy WinXP until the first service pack was released--and that saved our ass. I think it's ignorant to ignore that principle on the Mac side as well--esp. with a major update.

    Early adopters are unpaid beta testers. Congratulations--you found the bugs!

  • Apple or not... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by phillymjs ( 234426 ) <slashdot@stanTWAINgo.org minus author> on Saturday May 07, 2005 @11:27AM (#12462249) Homepage Journal
    ...you're a fool and deserve everything you get if you put a week-old OS on production hardware without doing non-production testing or having a fall-back.

    If you insist, however, do it right. Prep a build of the new OS and put it on its own hard drive in the machine of your one or two most clueful end users. Let them beat on it for a while and document their problems/questions as they try to do their work. Once in a while go through the list and address their fixable issues. If they happen upon a show-stopper, they simply boot from the drive with the old build on it and use that until the next service release appears. Then you apply it, and test again. Repeat as necessary until the number of issues is low enough that you can confidently deploy the new OS build to all end users.

    I have used this technique to great effect at several of my Mac clients, though I don't even consider giving them the newest OS until the .2 or .3 service releases have been out for a few weeks. A couple of my clients used to question this conservative method until some renegade users bought and installed Panther right after its release (without authorization from anyone) and ended up being basically unable to work until I reverted them to the standard OS/applications build.

    As for OS X Server, that gets tested in my company's lab and on my bench at home from the day we get it, but it doesn't get rolled out anywhere until .4, and even then we clone the old drive to a FireWire drive before upgrading, just to be safe.

    ~Philly

  • Works better than before for me (Score:3, Informative)

    by __aaaaxm1522 ( 121860 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @12:04PM (#12462394)
    That's odd.

    I'm running into the exact opposite scenario:

    Under Tiger, SMB filesharing *screams* as compared to how it ran under Panther and earlier incarnations of OS X. I'm able to connect to my samba fileshare on my Linux box, and my Win XP box, without any trouble whatsoever.

    In the past, I was always able to connect, but file transfers were dog-slow. They seem normal now.

    Go figure.

  • So far I'm having the opposite experience (Score:4, Informative)

    by NtroP ( 649992 ) on Saturday May 07, 2005 @01:23PM (#12462828)
    With 10.2 and Panther, getting client to successfully bind and work with Active Directory to something akin to VooDoo and several other flavors of black magic. That being said, when we did a thorough audit and clean up of Active Directory (Sites and Services, DNS, etc.) most of the problems disappeared, but there were often little things we did to increase our odds of things working smoothly.

    The other day a colleague of mine installed Tiger on his laptop (he never had it bound before, just connected to whatever shares with Cmd-K, etc.). He asked about using his AD credentials to log on. I told him "Sure, we just need to bind it to AD, do a few tweaks and anyone with an AD account could log in, just like Windows." Meanwhile, I was mentally crossing my fingers that there wouldn't be any new tweaks that needed to be learned.

    So I pointed him to Utilities/Directory Access and had him click the Active Directory option, put in his domain (this is where I would usually start my VooDoo dances with the "advanced" options -- but I thought, "what the hell, lets give it a shot") click on Bind. It asked for a domain admin account, which I entered, and it bound without a hitch (I about fainted). I had him reboot (just to make sure) and then had him log in with his AD account. I worked beautifully, including mounting his home directory off our Win2K server. This had NEVER worked without tweaking for us under panther (although with a little tweaking under 10.2.8+ it worked fine). We transfered files, which went smoothly and quickly, and we looked around the network a bit.

    Although I haven't thoroughly tested it yet, I'd say my initial experience with Tiger and SMB/AD has been great. That being said, MOST of our problems with Macs using our AD domain has been Windows-related (missing DNS entries, Sites-and-Services borked, or WINS not working/configured right, etc). Hearing about problems like this after a major change doesn't exactly surprise me, and I'm willing to cut Apple a bit of slack here. They are dealing with a reverse-engeneered protocol on networks where it is very likely that AD isn't in pristine or "best-practices" condition.

    We have 35 sites using AD right now in our domain, and the migration from NT4 to Win2K/AD was a learning experience, to say the least. We've learned a lot in the process and, we've found that if you mess up something in AD in the beginning, it's damn near impossible to cleanly remove or fix it. I suspect that there are a lot of installations out there that still have AD ghosts hanging around that make 3rd-party integration a crap-shoot at best. What apple needs to work on is improving their tolerance for broken AD implementations, like windows does.

    Of course, if MS would publish the full SMB/AD protocol it would be easier.

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