Tag Archives: 10.8

OS X 10.7/Lion attemping to mount a Windows 2008 file share: WTF?

Overall, I’m happy with the changes that Lion brings.  I was a bit thrown off by some of the changes that happened as Spaces got folded into Mission Control, but once I found out how to assign apps to desktops in the new style I calmed down.

We’re stuck with one vexing problem at work that’s Lion related:  We have all of the work Macs tied into Active Directory and that’s working pretty well.  However, we can’t seem to mount a Windows 2008 file share if it has access permissions on it.  This worked fine in Snow Leopard, but I’m getting an error dialog with “You do not have permission to access this server” when I use the “Connect to Server” GUI box.

However, if I go to the command line and issue a mount -t smbfs cifs://server/path/to/share /some/path it mounts just fine.  I’m not sure what the command line is doing different from the GUI, but seriously WTF?

Its holding us back from doing wider deployment.  I can live with doing a manual command, other users, not so much.

[Update: I’ve opened a bug with Apple.]

[Update 8/24/2011: Apple has put up a Knowledge Base article addressing this at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4829 which explains the behavior differences. I don’t have a great workaround yet but we know the why now.]

[Update 2/15/2012: 10.7.3 is still showing this behaviour]

[Update 9/14/2012: I should have posted this awhile ago, but Mountain Lion continues the trend of the behavior change.]