Arthur Murray, where are you?

August 19, 2005 3:55 PM

Samba and the Mac OS X Finder are driving me crazy.

I'm running Samba 3.0.10 on a Gentoo 2005.0 box, and it's working great -- in everything but the Mac OS X Finder. Note that I specify the Finder -- I can cp to it from the Mac OS X Terminal or have other Mac OS applications read to or write from it without the slightest hint of a problem. I can connect to it from a Windows XP box and use it just fine. I *only* have problems using the Samba share in the Finder itself.

The share appears and is browsable in the Finder -- but I can't write to it without an error. I don't think it's a permissions issue -- I can write to the share from everything else, including non-Finder apps on the same Mac. But when I do try to copy a file to it, I get the error:

"The operation cannot be completed because you do not have sufficient privileges for some of the items."

The kicker -- even with the error, the file has been successfully written to the Samba share. I just can't write multiple files at once, because the Finder copy fails. (I can, as above, go to terminal, run a cp * /Volumes/WORKGROUP;SHARE/, and that works just fine.)

I've Googled and Googled, but I can only find people having the same problem, with no apparent solution. If anyone knows of the solution, please let me know.

posted by eschatfische to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Silly question, you've tried mounting the share with 'cifs://' as well as with 'smb://', correct? I'm not too up-and-up on my Windows filesharing protocols, so I don't remember why they're different, but in many cases using CIFS to browse a SMB-like share will work drastically better than using SMB (in the Finder, that is).
posted by cyrusdogstar at 5:37 PM on August 19, 2005

Sockpuppet much? :D

And, I said it was a silly question because it was fairly obvious and I have nothing else to offer :( sorry! Maybe they'll actually do some work on the Finder for 10.5. Or 10.6. Who am I kidding, it'll get rewritten for 11 or XI or whatnot.
posted by cyrusdogstar at 5:56 PM on August 19, 2005

I don't know much about samba, but I'm running pretty much the same setup without problems. What are the permissions like on the Linux side? I know that samba is... weird... about permissions. Are you authenticating, or is the share open to the world (or "your network", as the case may be).
posted by Eamon at 7:04 PM on August 19, 2005

Make sure Finder isn't using the local username/passwd to access the share. Also, Windows uses encrypted passwords, and this must be turned on in the smb.conf file. Make sure Finder does also, or if it doesn't, you'll have to find some way to selectively use them for one & not for the other. Dunno if that works or not.
posted by devilsbrigade at 7:13 PM on August 19, 2005

Response by poster: Eamon: I'm authenticating -- this is a password-protected share. Permissions are 777 all the way through the shared directories.

devilsbrigade: Everything (server, Windows, Mac OS) are using encrypted passwords.
posted by eschatfische at 7:28 PM on August 19, 2005

Response by poster: Er, everything *is* using encrypted passwords.
posted by eschatfische at 7:28 PM on August 19, 2005

Best answer: Not sure if it'll help, but I was experiencing the same error with OS X Finder and my Samba shares. Tuned out to be an ownership issue with the directories I was sharing. They were owned by root, I chowned them to the user I login as normaly and everything worked.
posted by jackmakrl at 7:43 PM on August 19, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks, jackmakrl! Because permissions were set correctly for world, I didn't assume ownership would matter. The share was a FAT32 partition, too, so I didn't think it was possible to change the ownership to anyone other than root -- but I did some research, added the appropriate uid= and gid= statement in /etc/fstab, remounted, and the problem is gone.
posted by eschatfische at 12:46 PM on August 20, 2005