Mac OS X 10.6 and Samba browsing sucks! Wait, no!

https://doc.ikw.uni-osnabrueck.de/node/3211
http://rydberg.biology.colostate.edu/sites/bioit/2009/11/10/snow-leopard-and-samba-for-pangea/

Mac OS X Snow Leopard (a.k.a 10.6) has introduced a great and annoying bug. One can not browse Samba shares if the veto files option is used on the Samba server. Ususally one wants to have the .DS_Store et al. files gone on your network share.

But, no you need to turn that option of. Or at least take the Apple-specific files out of that list in /etc/samba/smb.conf:

delete veto files = Yes
veto files = /lost+found/Network Trash Folder/TheFindByContentFolder/TheVolumeSettingsFolder/
# Bad OS X files, but necessary for Snow Leopard:
#.AppleDB/.AppleDouble/.DS_Store/._.TemporaryItems/.TemporaryItems/

After a restart of Samba things work again.

Snow Leopard and SAMBA for Pangea

With the release of Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) there have been reports of slowness, and hanging of the Finder when attempting to access SAMBA (SMB) network shares. SAMBA network shares are essentially the most popular type of network share in use today, and the primary method of sharing files between Macintosh computers and Windows computers.



Unfortunately for us, Pangea uses SAMBA to share its files. So, we have been experiencing these symptoms, primarily the hanging of Finder when attempting to browse through sub-directories within your Pangea space. For the past couple of months since Snow Leopard has been released, I have been patiently monitoring several forum threads for a solution as well as silently hoping that the releases of 10.6.1 and 10.6.2 would address and fix these issues automatically. This has not happened.

On the other side, these forum threads have provided a solution to this problem which I have implemented on the Pangea server. This solution was to remove a line in the Pangea SAMBA configuration file that prevented certain files from being created by Apple client computers (those of you connecting to Pangea with your Macintosh computers). This line is called the ‘veto file’ setting is now turned off and Macintosh computers will start freely placing these strange files onto the Pangea spaces they access. These files include .DS_Store, .AppleDesktop, .AppleDouble, and .Trashes to name just a few. These files will not be visible to Macintosh computers, but will start showing up in the file lists for Windows computers. The important thing is that this has solved the SAMBA access issues with Finder.

So, for the end users who glaze over with the above technical explanation – Snow Leopard can now access Pangea normally, but will be creating strange files and folders (.DS_Store, .AppleDesktop, .AppleDouble, .Trashes, etc.) which will only be viewable by Windows clients on default.

Thank you for your patience with this, and I will remain optimistic that at some point the future I can re-enable the ‘veto file’ line. Enjoy!