Did Mavericks kill your SMB network drive access? Here’s a fix

Among the issues some people have had with OS X 10.9 Mavericks, one of the biggest gotchas was a loss of access to SMB network shares — the connection some NAS devices (Network attached storage), Windows PCs or Linux servers use to provide file sharing.

In my case, I got the double foul. My NAS tried to mount forever and failed; same with a Windows 8 PC on my network. The cause appears to be changes made in the networking stack made by Apple. Apple’s SMB2 implementation doesn’t work with a lot of SMB2 devices — even networked drives from Windows machines.

One easy fix involves changing a little bit of text in your server connection URL. Here’s how it works: In the Finder, choose the “Go” menu and select “Connect to Server…” (command-K). Type “cifs://yourservername” and hit Return; the server should mount.

CIFS (Common Internet File System) is just another name for the SMB protocol, but using it in the server URL forces the Finder to use the older (not broken) SMB1 implementation, rather than the buggy SMB2. It worked for me with both my NAS and my Windows PC, so there’s a good chance it will work for you.

Apple’s Support Boards are filled with users pulling their hair out over this one, so we hope the tip is of use to you.

Thanks to Cammodude for the solution here; he also posts a Terminal tip (at your own risk) for permanently forcing Finder to use SMB1 instead of SMB2.

Did Mavericks kill your SMB network drive access? Here’s a fix originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 27 Oct 2013 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *