Some Sage Advice

This has to go down into one of the X-Files as this is too weird to be a coincidence. Just yesterday, I spent half a day at a client site troubleshooting network disconnects. The parameters are as follows: all Macs are running Tiger 10.4.8, the shared network volume is a Windows 2003 share, and the share is SMB (not Appletalk). In every case, the random disconnect happens only when a Mac user is saving a file to the shared SMB volume. Windows users are not affected.

This error had stumped me as I had never seen it before and not with such alarming regularity. Four or five Mac users were seeing this disconnect message at least once a day. Scouring the Windows logs and the Mac’s console logs didn’t reveal anything. And, the weird thing is that if the user ignored the message, eventually the file would save just fine.

Here is the message error:

Now, today, I was running my Retrospect backup (which if you read my earlier post failed to complete and locked up my Mac) and I got the same message for the first time EVER. Weird (or is it me??). In fact, my message appeared every few seconds followed by a second error which appears to be a Leopard-specific error.

So where did this come from, what is the cause, and more importantly, what is the solution? This is definitely an Apple file sharing problem that only happens with high traffic or high activity to a Windows-mounted SMB share. It doesn’t happen with Mac clients connected to Appleshare volumes (either on a Mac or Windows server) and it doesn’t happen to Windows clients.

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Just when I was starting to like Leopard, it went ahead and crushed me. It left me standing at the prom all alone with that sinking feeling. Here’s the latest with my little Leopard…

Of course I updated to 10.5.1 as soon as it was released by Apple since I knew it fixed a boatload of problems. However, as with many system updates, they can break as many things as they fix. First of, Time Machine, the really cool automated backup and recovery part of Leopard has never worked for me. And with the 10.5.1 update, it still doesn’t work. I have another large firewire drive I am going to build this weekend so perhaps that will solve the problem. I also changed my file sharing name from “Dean Novosat’s Mac” to “Dean Novosat Mac” because I read that if your sharing names contains characters other than 0-9 and A-Z it would cause Time Machine to fail. Great feature since by default, Apple’s own installer names your machine with an apostrophe “s” on it.

Then today I had a major malfunction. I use Retrospect to backup my local hard drive and 4 shared volumes of a Windows 2000 server. Some of the shares are SMB and some are AFP. I backup about 160GB of data to an internal SATA 500GB drive. This has performed flawlessly under Tiger since I installed it long ago. Retrospect kicks off automatically at 4:30 am, does its backup thing, then is quietly goes back to bed keeping me feel safe and secure. Well, the first week of Leopard, Retrospect never woke up to do a backup. So today, I manually started it. It backed up great for about 5 hours. Then, for no reason whatsoever, I started getting the error “Server Disconnected” and I lost all network connectivity. I couldn’t get email, get on the internet, or access any of my shared volumes.

So, a simple restart should clear this problem…or so I thought! Not only did something (Retrospect, file sharing, ??) kill my backup in mid-stream, but it locked up OTHER applications as well. This is NEVER supposed to happen in OS X. Obviously, someone isn’t playing nice on the Leopard playground! I had to force quit several applications and then the Mac would restart. Only…it started to shutdown and it hung on the dreaded blue screen! I thought the blue screen of death (BSOD) was a Windows phenomenon not a Mac thing! So, I had to hard power off the Mac by holding the power button in for 10 seconds.

After a nice long reboot, I have Retrospect running again. Only time will tell if it fails this time or if it succeeds. I’ll check back in about 5 hours.