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File Sharing Difficulties Frustrate Tiger Admins
rmallico wrote in to mention a story currently running on Eweek about technical difficulties sites running Tiger are experiencing. From the article: "A number of sites running Apple's new 'Tiger' operating system are experiencing problems with SMB file sharing and authentication with Microsoft's Active Directory, Ziff Davis Internet News has learned. Although Apple Computer Inc.'s Tiger increases support for Server Message Block file sharing and Active Directory, several sources say that the Finder fails to log on to Windows and Linux Samba file servers."
Weird, I've found with Tiger that Windows file sharing has been easier, although I don't use Active Directory. With Panther my password was never remembered by Keychain, despite clicking the option to enable it. With Tiger my password is remembered. It also finds my Windows shares automatically, whereas with Panther I had to manually connect by entering IP addresses.
It is useful until you find that error -36 is written up as:
-36 ioErr I/O error
It'll point you in the right direction I guess, but it's by no means a definitive description of the error.
I must admit that I'm a little baffled as to why Apple don't include better error reporting and descriptions in OSX. It is because they are still assuming these kind of errors will only be seen by techs that know what they mean, or are they still living in a world where they refuse to acknowledge that Macs do throw up the occasional message to the user?
IO error can not read or write to the directory . meaning it is not there , the reason for this is Apples implementation of samba on tiger requires the full path
On a related note: I'm seeing really bad performance when copying a file from a Linux Samba share to my OSX machine (roughly 100 kb/sec, if that). Oddly enough, file uploads are ok (megabytes per second). Odder still, if I open a terminal and copy directly to my machine from the Samba share mount point, incoming copies are fast too. This has been going on from at least 10.2, and much to my dismay it is still an issue in 10.4. This really seems like the Finder is trying to talk Sambalese by itself (and does so differently than the SMB filesystem driver). Has anyone else noticed this behavior (and, perhaps, solved it)?
I used to work with samba, having a linux fileserver and a mac osx powerbook, but recently I started working with nfs. It seems a bit faster and more stable. When I change some file on the server, it's directly visible in finder - without having to refresh it.
I also was annoyed the fact when I turned my powerbook on after it went to sleep it would give me a lot of errors about unmounting a network drive. This also was the case with tiger. With nfs, those problems are gone an nfs mount will stay active after the powerbook comes back from sleep.
Perhaps they need to do more automatic regression testing (daily) on each build then?
I think the car analogy is (for once : ) a good one. We have come to expect failure from Software, and that shouldn't be the case - it should be very rare, not inevitable with each new release. They did rush the release of Tiger, and certain things suffered for it. Yes they will probably fix it quickly, but it'd be nice if they had a more extensive testing program, with sufficient time alllotted to do the QA work, for catching regressions like this.
Well I don't agree with your idea of Apple's mantra 'Users are Idiots' I use to but it is more of mantra 'Don't make it needlessly difficult to do common tasks'
As a programmer I will often give me error numbers because when I need to fix it the error numbers help me find it in the code quicker. And when I give more detailed error messages. The users will try to analysis my message outside of the context of my code and try to fix it them self. So if I put an error message "Out of Allocated Memory" except for error 49112, the user will go out and buy some more ram hoping it will fix the problem except for going to me and saying hey I have an error 49112 where I will know that I will need to change my code to either be more memory efficient in an area or allocate more ram.
It is not a situation that the User is an idiot it is that they may not have the context of how things are running in the programming level. So when they see an IO error they will go trying to fix there network cards, reinstall their printers and other drivers before reporting the problem with the program.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.