Major Mac OS X Leopard SMB bug solved!

[HEXUS]

Soon after deploying OS X Leopard on a series of iMacs, we noticed some worrying behaviour when trying to connect securely to SMB shares. Happily, though, HEXUS discovered a workaround for this bug!

Read more.

[Bob Crabtree]

Now nobody with a grain of sense is going to be able to say that you've been blinded to any shortcomings in Mac OS X as a result of having made the switch!

Nice one!

[vinnyT]

I'm sure I've missed something here, but in that link you stated that;

"My friend knew that I'd made the switch to Leopard earlier in the day and that I also had SMB shares. To try to track down the problem, he first wanted to establish if his iMac could connect to one of the passworded shares on my network - and it could, with no problem at all, even though this was happening remotely via a virtual private network (VPN)."

Now I assume (I know you shouldn't do that) that your friend typed in the password with the %£$ symbols in it, and he connected fine, this would indicate that the password was accepted with the $%£, and was not the problem.

Maybe your keyboard settings are not for english(UK), but for english(US), and when you press the % key it was interpretted as another letter/symbol, and so was not recognised as the correct password.

Sorry if I've totally mis-read the post.

[DR]

I'm sure I've missed something here, but in that link you stated that;

"My friend knew that I'd made the switch to Leopard earlier in the day and that I also had SMB shares. To try to track down the problem, he first wanted to establish if his iMac could connect to one of the passworded shares on my network - and it could, with no problem at all, even though this was happening remotely via a virtual private network (VPN)."

Now I assume (I know you shouldn't do that) that your friend typed in the password with the %£$ symbols in it, and he connected fine, this would indicate that the password was accepted with the $%£, and was not the problem.

Maybe your keyboard settings are not for english(UK), but for english(US), and when you press the % key it was interpretted as another letter/symbol, and so was not recognised as the correct password.

Sorry if I've totally mis-read the post.

The setup worked fine under Tiger not under Leopard. When he changed the pasword not to include characters such as - %£$ it worked fine.... but when it did include characters such as %£$ it didn't

[geneh]

Try connecting to your Windows shares this way. Works fine for me in Leopard. (No spaces in the actual address.) For added convenience, you then may want to add the share as a Login Item in the Accounts System Preferences.

cifs://workgroup name or domain name:windows username@IP address/share name

---
GeneH @ genehuller.com

[vinnyT]

The setup worked fine under Tiger not under Leopard. When he changed the pasword not to include characters such as - %£$ it worked fine.... but when it did include characters such as %£$ it didn't

Gotcha. Told you I'd missed something.

[sdlynx]

I actually have a 10 character alphanumeric with special characters as my login to my Leopard MacBook Pro, and everything works fine except the smb and cifs connections. I get the exact same behavior. This leads me to believe that the problem is focused in the network authentication only, and not OSX Leopard in general.

hmmmm...

[DR]

I actually have a 10 character alphanumeric with special characters as my login to my Leopard MacBook Pro, and everything works fine except the smb and cifs connections. I get the exact same behavior. This leads me to believe that the problem is focused in the network authentication only, and not OSX Leopard in general.

hmmmm...

That is interesting that they use different authentication systems....

[emmanuel.gomez]

YMMV, but after reading this thread I was reminded of an issue I've had before regarding passwords and URIs. In short, *some* extended characters must be URI escaped.

I have a password that contains a % and $, and I was unable to connect using Apple-K with smb://username@server.domain.tld/share. It would prompt for the password, but then hang interminable on the 'Connecting to server smb:// ....' progress bar.

But, by URI escaping my password, I have just now been able to connect with no problems. One way to URI-escape a password is to type the following at the terminal:

ruby -ruri -e 'puts URI.escape("YourPasswordGoesHere")'

Hopefully this will help someone!

[sdlynx]

Thanks for your escaping method.

I tried it, but I still couldn't connect. Still getting hung on netauthagent. I think this one is going a little deeper than just a password issue for me.

It did work for my home network, though.

Thanks