Friday 12 August 2011

Windows Server 2008 File Share Clustering and OSX 10.4

At work we had to bring a Apple Mac back into service. Since decommissioning the Mac we have moved to a clustered file server on Windows 2008 R2.

We tried to get onto some shares on the Windows 2008 R2 clustered file server and got an error saying directory or file does not exist. Looking on the web we found that there were a number of people with the same problem. It seemed to be an issue with clustered file servers because we successfully connected to shares on non clustered file servers.

Our Apple Mac is on OSX 10.4 but the problem seemed to be more previlant on 10.5 AND 10.6.

We found a few posts that said that you could get around the problem by typing the port number in the 'Connect to server' option.

For example 'smb://[servername]:139/[share]' however this didn't solve our problem.

We finally found a work around by using a hidden ($) share in the path to the shared folder.

For example 'smb://[servername]/X$/path/to/share'

Hopefully this will help someone as it was an odd issue that took a bit of solving