Network Share Problems on a Mac


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I've been having problems with unRIAD's network shares on a my Mac since day one. I get errors like this randomly and usually when I click on the share in finder I get an error that it couldn't be found.    
Usually when I got to 'Network' in finder and select the Server from there it works out, but sometimes it just doesn't. Right now I'm stuck with 'Not Connected'. Trying to 'connect as' doesn't do anything. I should be logged in as a user anyways. I'm currently using SMB with 'Enhanced OS X interoperability' and security set to private. I've used AFP before but that seems to be even worse.    
Has anyone else been experiencing anything like this and knows a fix ? 

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Just now, ashman70 said:

I have and have had similar problems in my Mac with unRAID forever, I gave up ages ago trying to figure it out, I just put up with them.

But is it an problem with unRAID or is it just the mac ? 

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I looked at your error message and quickly found that my limited knowledge of German did not provide me any clue regarding the substance of the error message.  However, you must realize that SMB has a lot of eccentricities!  (It was first introduced back in Windows for Workgroups (version 3.1)  as a way to link a few PC's together without requiring the use of a dedicated server.  It was a kludge then and has progressed only little further since then.  I believe if you set a computer to run Windows 3.1, it will still work on an modern SMB network!)  Tom (LimeTech) had a discussion a while back on a couple of these types of issues.  You can read about in the following post and several that followed up on it.

 

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Yes and No--- you understand some of the issues on the Windows side because they are going to present the same issues when you are using OSX.  Example, the SMB server will only recognize one connection from each NetBIOS named computer. 

 

Does OSX maintain a record of 'credentials' to permit quicker logins? 

 

How does OSX handle capitalization in the naming of resources and user names?  (Linux honors them and Windows ignores leading to the situation where SAM and sam are the same resource to Windows and two different ones to Linux.)

 

So you are going to have to define exactly what you are trying to do and what are the problems you are expirencing.

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The shares on my various unRAID servers are mostly set to private and some are secure. In OSX there is a 'connect as' button and you can enter a username and password and tick a box so that OSX remembers those credentials. Often times, randomly, the connection to an unRAID share will just drop, reconnecting is a pain in the @$$ with finder sometimes simply crashing while attempting to reconnect to the share, which has to be done manually. I usually find I have to connect, disconnect, connect a few times before the connection with the share can be re established and will work. Sometimes I'll sit down at my Mac after being away from it for hours and try to copy something out of an unRAID share, the whole process will hang, then the message box will pop up saying the connection to said share has been terminated and finder will usually close. Then I have go through the whole manual process again of reconnecting to the share.

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You say you have some shares that are set to secure.  What happens if you connect to them in the guest/Public mode where you have read-only access?  Do you still lose the connection?


Another bit of information SMB 'spec' is sort-of controlled by MS. Samba is a free software re-implementation of the SMB/CIFS, and was originally developed byAndrew Tridgell.

As an aside, unRAID users running the early releases of Win10 had issues until the Samba developers could adjust their code to account for some changes that MS made in Win10. 

 

Samba runs on most Unix, OpenVMS and Unix-like systems, such as Linux, Solaris, AIX and the BSD variants, including Apple's macOS Server, and macOS client (Mac OS X 10.2 and greater). Samba is standard on nearly all distributions of Linux and is commonly included as a basic system service on other Unix-based operating systems as well. Samba is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The name Samba comes from SMB (Server Message Block), the name of the standard protocol used by the Microsoft Windows network file system. [wikipedia quote].

 

As you can see, it is very popular file sharing protocol that is used on a wide variety of OS's.   As I said, it is a real kludge and anyone who is using it will eventually run into some kind of issue.  Most or them are solvable once someone can finally figure out what is really happening.  As you look at the list of OS's that support it, it is almost a miracle that it almost works as well as it sometimes does.  O.o

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23 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

You say you have some shares that are set to secure.  What happens if you connect to them in the guest/Public mode where you have read-only access?  Do you still lose the connection?


Another bit of information SMB 'spec' is sort-of controlled by MS. Samba is a free software re-implementation of the SMB/CIFS, and was originally developed byAndrew Tridgell.

As an aside, unRAID users running the early releases of Win10 had issues until the Samba developers could adjust their code to account for some changes that MS made in Win10. 

 

Samba runs on most Unix, OpenVMS and Unix-like systems, such as Linux, Solaris, AIX and the BSD variants, including Apple's macOS Server, and macOS client (Mac OS X 10.2 and greater). Samba is standard on nearly all distributions of Linux and is commonly included as a basic system service on other Unix-based operating systems as well. Samba is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The name Samba comes from SMB (Server Message Block), the name of the standard protocol used by the Microsoft Windows network file system. [wikipedia quote].

 

As you can see, it is very popular file sharing protocol that is used on a wide variety of OS's.   As I said, it is a real kludge and anyone who is using it will eventually run into some kind of issue.  Most or them are solvable once someone can finally figure out what is really happening.  As you look at the list of OS's that support it, it is almost a miracle that it almost works as well as it sometimes does.  O.o

It's similar when connecting as a guest. In fact in my experience it's been even worse, because sometimes it won't connect at all without using any credentials.

Are there any viable alternatives to using network shares ? 

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I have multiple Macs, Mac Mini, Mac Pro, iMac etc, and have not had any connection issues with 2 UnRaid servers.

i also have multiple versions of OSX running, the Mac Pro has 4, from OSX Snow Leopard to El Capitan.

My Minis connect to the EyeTV share by them selves when EyeTV is started.

All my shares are public, server 1 is smb, server 2 is afp.

I do not let any of my computers sleep because of issues with other software that I run, I only let my displays sleep, not the drives and not the CPUs. So maybe you could try that to see what happens.

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It sounds like you have a Mac only environment with no Windows, is that the case? I have windows in my environment, from Windows 7, to 10 and servers too, I don't know if that matters or not. I just realized my Mac was joined to my Active Directory domain, so to see if that was the issue, I have disjoined it now.

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8 hours ago, ashman70 said:

It sounds like you have a Mac only environment with no Windows, is that the case? I have windows in my environment, from Windows 7, to 10 and servers too, I don't know if that matters or not. I just realized my Mac was joined to my Active Directory domain, so to see if that was the issue, I have disjoined it now.

Yes, only Macs here except for a Raspberry Pi, but that never connects to either server.

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  • 8 months later...

Hi all,

 

Not sure if this is a valid concern for anyone anymore, but I have been struggling with using a mac at work with Unraid, and was a BI%^H to use, until I finally figured it out with Google's help.  I am only minimally technically proficient, and most of this stuff is Greek to me, but I can put what I found here, in case anyone can gain any benefit from it.  

 

Apparently the reason recent versions of OS X don't play well with Unraid is Apple's implementation of Samba / SMB.  Something called Client Signing is defaulted to "on", and it seems like Finder times out while trying to sign in each time.

 

The easy temporary fix is to open up a Terminal window and type the following command:

printf "[default]\nsigning_required=no\n" | sudo tee /etc/nsmb.conf >/dev/null

The permanent solution that stays after a reboot is to put the following code into /etc/nsmb:

[default]
signing_required=no

I can confirm that I have been running without disconnections / slowdowns  for a few weeks now.

 

Credit to the dpron at the below link for an excellent post that gives thorough technical details as well was how to reverse it should you need to.

 

https://dpron.com/os-x-10-11-5-slow-smb/

 

Best of luck to all... Hope it works.  Just wanted to share since this issue was driving me insane.

 

Fauzi

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5 hours ago, fauzigarib said:

Not sure if this is a valid concern for anyone anymore,

 

I haven't noticed a problem with SMB under Sierra or High Sierra  (or with AFP since moving the netatalk database onto my cache pool) but I read the article you linked with interest. The thing is, with macOS 10.13.4 High Sierra I don't see a SIGNING_ON field when I run smbutil:

13inMBP:~ john_m$ smbutil statshares -a

==================================================================================================
SHARE                         ATTRIBUTE TYPE                VALUE
==================================================================================================
M_Temp                        
                              SERVER_NAME                   Mandaue._smb._tcp.local
                              USER_ID                       501
                              SMB_NEGOTIATE                 SMBV_NEG_SMB1_ENABLED
                              SMB_NEGOTIATE                 SMBV_NEG_SMB2_ENABLED
                              SMB_NEGOTIATE                 SMBV_NEG_SMB3_ENABLED
                              SMB_VERSION                   SMB_3.02
                              SMB_SHARE_TYPE                DISK
                              SIGNING_SUPPORTED             TRUE
                              EXTENDED_SECURITY_SUPPORTED   TRUE
                              UNIX_SUPPORT                  TRUE
                              LARGE_FILE_SUPPORTED          TRUE
                              OS_X_SERVER                   TRUE
                              DFS_SUPPORTED                 TRUE
                              FILE_LEASING_SUPPORTED        TRUE
                              MULTI_CREDIT_SUPPORTED        TRUE
                              ENCRYPTION_SUPPORTED          TRUE

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
13inMBP:~ john_m$ 

According to the first comment on that post, the field isn't shown if signing is disabled. So I investigated further:

13inMBP:~ john_m$ cat /etc/nsmb.conf 
[default]
signing_required=no
13inMBP:~ john_m$

It looks as though signing is disabled by default. Or is it? Definitely curious now, I investigated another Mac which had recently had a clean install of High Sierra:

MacBook-J:~ john_m$ smbutil statshares -a

==================================================================================================
SHARE                         ATTRIBUTE TYPE                VALUE
==================================================================================================
M_Temp                        
                              SERVER_NAME                   Mandaue._smb._tcp.local
                              USER_ID                       501
                              SMB_NEGOTIATE                 SMBV_NEG_SMB1_ENABLED
                              SMB_NEGOTIATE                 SMBV_NEG_SMB2_ENABLED
                              SMB_NEGOTIATE                 SMBV_NEG_SMB3_ENABLED
                              SMB_VERSION                   SMB_3.02
                              SMB_SHARE_TYPE                DISK
                              SIGNING_SUPPORTED             TRUE
                              EXTENDED_SECURITY_SUPPORTED   TRUE
                              UNIX_SUPPORT                  TRUE
                              LARGE_FILE_SUPPORTED          TRUE
                              OS_X_SERVER                   TRUE
                              DFS_SUPPORTED                 TRUE
                              FILE_LEASING_SUPPORTED        TRUE
                              MULTI_CREDIT_SUPPORTED        TRUE
                              ENCRYPTION_SUPPORTED          TRUE

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MacBook-J:~ john_m$ cat /etc/nsmb.conf
cat: /etc/nsmb.conf: No such file or directory
MacBook-J:~ john_m$ 

So maybe this is all something from the past and it doesn't apply to recent macOS versions. 

 

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