10.6.3 Update Breaking SMB Mounted Volume Write Access for Many

If you need to write to a mounted volume over SMB, you might want to hold off on updating to OS X 10.6.3 if you haven’t done so already: Apple support forum users are reporting major problems in multiple threads that SMB is borked.

Reader Eric Dube writes:

[T]here seems to be a systemic issue with the latest 10.6.3 update from Apple breaking write access to SMB shares for many users. The problem occurs when you try to copy a file with extended file attributes to the SMB share – files without extended attributes can be copied. I can honestly say the problem breaks connectivity to every one of my SMB shares that I’ve tried and need to access on a daily basis. So far there’s no word from Apple (numerous people including myself have reported the issue though) or any known workaround that works (other than copying the files from a terminal prompt instead of the finder.)…
At this point, I’m already considering backing out the update and going back to 10.6.2 since that works just fine. It appears to be a wide-spread problem, so it might be worth looking into to warn users about.

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It certainly seems to be a wide-spread issue, although not one that affects me personally. Have any of you guys noticed this problem since updating to 10.6.3? Let us know in the comments, especially if you found a solution that has worked for you in getting around the issue.

13 comments »

About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in News, OS X |

MfS
Nope. We use 8-10 Macs in an Active Directory / Windows Server environment, and of the Macs that have been upgraded to 10.6.3, we’ve had no issues…and we read & write to SMB-mounted volumes (set to “mount” at login) multiple times daily.
Eric
This could potentially be isolated to Samba SMB shares only, but there’s a number of NAS appliances which may or may not be using Samba as the basis for file shares which are also experiencing the problem. The issue only popped up with the 10.6.3 update for the majority of users reporting the problem (including myself.)
Herman
Thanks! I was wondering why I couldn’t pass mp3s to my colleagues anymore :(
http://zimzer.com/johan Yo-han
We are using SMB shares on some Linux dev servers and had also some write problems today after updating to 10.6.3. A few files won’t be copied but most of them don’t show any problems.
http://www.fort90.com/journal/ fort90
As others have stated, at least its nice to know that I’m not the only one with the issue.
Rubber Johnny
Still here laddie. I thought you must have received a well-deserved caning after yesterday’s childish, ill-considered cad-fest.
A pity you haven’t gone into hiding out of shame, but you did the next best thing. You carry on writing trash for CoM.
Figures. How does that song go?
Sweets for my sweet,
Shitloads for my Kahney….
http://www.arnekuilman.nl Arne
We have this issue since 10.6.2 with our Linux SMB shares. The weird thing is that not all Macs are affected. Upgrading to 10.6.3 solved the issues for some Mac’s, but not for others. The problems manifests with spinning beachballs not updating Finder windows of the SMB shares.
So far:
MacBook Alu 10.6.2 no access to SMB:// share. 10.6.3 now it’s OK
MacBook white 1st gen 10.6.2 no access to SMB:// share. 10.6.3 now it’s OK
MacBook Alu 10.6.2 no access to SMB share. 10.6.3 no access to SMB share
MacBook Pro 15″ 2007 access to SMB with 10.6.2 and access with 10.6.3 update
An ethernet connections seems to work best for us, whereas the internet you’ll find Airport connections working for other people.
We’ve got 30 MacBooks and the SMB issue definitely isn’t smooth sailing with Samba with either 10.6.2 or 10.6.3 as it was with Snow Leopard 10.6 sec.
http://www.djmnet.org David MacKenzie
I’ve been using the following config file change since Leopard to work around SMB extended attribute bugs, particularly interoperating with Windows XP. I haven’t tried 10.6.3 yet, but maybe it will solve those problems. This diff is from the 10.6.2 Samba config file.
— /etc/smb.conf 2010/01/22 00:04:17 1.4
+++ /etc/smb.conf 2010/01/22 00:05:02
@@ -44,7 +44,7 @@
display charset = UTF-8
dos charset = 437
- vfs objects = notify_kqueue,darwinacl,darwin_streams
+ vfs objects = notify_kqueue,darwinacl
; Don’t become a master browser unless absolutely necessary.
os level = 2
@@ -59,8 +59,8 @@
stat cache = no
; The darwin_streams module gives us named streams support.
- stream support = yes
- ea support = yes
+ stream support = no
+ ea support = no
; Enable locking coherency with AFP.
darwin_streams:brlm = yes
http://splatdot.com Dean Franklin
Turning off Unix extensions in my Samba server solved the problem for me. More details here: http://splatdot.com/fixing-snow-leopard-10-6-3-samba-write-access/
http://loop12.org Phillip
Until the finder is updated these are a few workarounds I’ve used to successfully save to SMB shares:
1. Use another app such as Adobe Bridge or Pathfinder
2. FTP
3. “Save As” from an application (e.g. Photoshop) to save to the SMB share.
Matthew Smith
I finally worked around this issue by editing the smb.conf file on my NAS. Here is a link to the solution:
http://splatdot.com/fixing-snow-leopard-10-6-3-samba-write-access/
KiltBear
Oddly enough, the problem I was having is that you could copy a file from a windows client to an SMB share from 10.6.3 server (with files on an XSAN) but you could not copy them off!!! Clients would copy the contents of the file locally, but would bork at the end and delete the local file claiming the file could not be found.
Like many others, editing /etc/smb.conf and setting “streams = no” is getting me around the problem.
KiltBear
ACK! (correction to my comment above) My problem was you could put files onto the Xserver running SMB, but you could not copy them FROM the SMB mount on a windows client…