Mac OS X 10.5.x and Windows 2008 Clustered File Share Problems
November 5th, 2008 -
Posted by: Len in Technology, tags: apple, macosx, microsoft, windows
After upgrading a Windows Server 2003 clustered file server to Windows Server 2008, Mac OS X 10.5 clients would no longer connect to the file server. After much searching, I found that Microsoft changed something about share name scoping on clustered resources causing non-Microsoft clients to fail. Of course, Microsoft blames Apple and Apple blames Microsoft for incompatibility issues which really doesn’t help anyone.
I found one work-around to the problem for Mac OS X clients – In Mac OS X finder, use Cmd-K to bring up the Connect to Server dialog. For the server address, use either:
smb://fileserver:139/sharename
or
cifs://fileserver:139/sharename
Share browsing of the server doesn’t seem to work so you need to specify the share which you want to connect to and specifying port 139 seems to fix the problem.
Weird stuff. Not sure who to blame on this one really but I expect a little better compatibility on these “enterprise” class products. As a side-note, these changes to clustered file sharing even causes issues with Exchange 2007 running on a Windows Server 2008 cluster. When Microsoft can’t even get their own software to work correctly, I think it’s easier to know who to blame.
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January 29th, 2009 at 11:37 am
I have seen this post on a couple websites but I still cannot get it to work. I have disabled the firewall and still no luck. I cannot connect with any version of OS X and I am currently running 10.4.11
Also, the cluster servers are on a different VLAN than our clients are on.
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Eric Reply:
January 29th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
I did some more testing and it is now working. Not sure why it wasn’t at first. Thanks for the post, and you can remove these if you like.
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March 2nd, 2009 at 11:24 am
This post was a life saver, Extremez-IP was crashing my 2008 cluster for no reason that i could figure randomly when the mac people would browse the netwrk shares with the smb command this solves everything ….. I thank you from the bottom of my windows heart
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Charles Reply:
April 10th, 2009 at 8:55 am
Hi Simmo,
I work at Grouplogic supporting ExtremeZ-IP and came across your post from a Google alert.
If your server is crashing (BSOD) it’s probably related to a known problem Microsoft is working on.
In the meantime we posted a workaround/fix of our own
http://support.grouplogic.com/?p=1497
As far as I know, there are no issues with ExtremeZ-IP running on 2008 Cluster
If the OS or Service is crashing a dump file should be created which should provide an explanation for the crash.
Be careful about allowing your Mac clients to connect via both SMB and AFP. Each uses a different mechanism to store resource fork info and are not compatible. Mixed file sharing between Windows SMB users and Mac SMB users will also be a problem. The best practice is for Windows to use SMB and Mac clients to use AFP so that complete compatibility in handling resource forks is maintained.
If you need to open a case, please do so here:
http://support.grouplogic.com/?page_id=39&product=extremez-ip
Best Regards,
Charles Kim
ExtremeZ-IP Support
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Anonymous Reply:
June 4th, 2010 at 2:46 pm
The comments about the resource fork is not completely accurate. If you enable streams support on the Mac Client 10.5.x and higher, then you can use both smb and afp without resource fork issues.
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July 20th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Thanks for the post! It helps!
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February 25th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
Just an FYI, this seems to be fixed in OS 10.6.
Thanks for the info for 10.5, though.
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August 23rd, 2010 at 3:05 pm
This did not work for me.
Instead I used cifs://serverip:139/sharename and this worked. Thanks for getting to this point.
Cheers
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