SMB Borked in Lion?
 

I upgraded to Lion overnight and now find that none of my XBMC installations can access the SMB shares on the Lion machine.

XBMC log:

Any ideas?

Have a look at this thread and you'll see that there does appear to be issues with SMB and Lion, and you'll read about some potential workarounds.

Thanks I'd seen that thread. I'm pretty happy with my XBMC home entertainment network as is. So I'm cloning 10.6.8 back to my boot drive as I write. I'll reinstall Lion if the SMB issue ever gets worked out.

Odd that this didn't get more mention from the developer/beta crowd.

I'm not an XMBC user, but it's hiccups like this which are why I never update quickly. I've installed Lion to a separate partition for familiarizing myself with it, but there's no way I'm going with it full time until I know everything will be okay for my setup.

That's why I had a clone ready to go. I have to admit that excitement got the better of me. I've lived my entire adult life overseas in rather isolated spots. This was the first time in a very long time that I was able to obtain and install a Mac OS update the same day it was released. In my defense, I only installed it on one of the six Macs in the house!

Oh, I understand the excitement. It's like a new toy, and toys are fun. If it helps you, you may want to keep an eye on this Roaring Apps table of compatible applications, and MacInTouch has in the past offered something similar. I'm not sure if they're doing that for Lion, but I presume they'll have it up soon if they plan to do so. Since I typically wait until the x.x.2 release before making the new OS my main one, I haven't started researching potential software incompatibilities, but I'm sure that one or both of those links will be helpful for checking any software I need or want to update/replace.

Maybe I'll give this a try:

Installing Samba 3 on Mac OS X 10.7 using MacPorts

What the heck. Xcode is now a free download from the Mac App Store, and you've got a clone of 10.6 you can revert to, if needed. You have tested the clone by booting to it, right?

Yes, the clone is bootable. I'll wait until next week to install Samba 3. My wife will not be happy if there is no XBMC this weekend...

At the end of the day Apple have dumped Samba and now use their own custom SMBX.
I am sure you can tweak the config to get it all working....have not had a look yet !
I would urge you not to bother installing Samba on Lion, it will probably open a can of worms.

Also as such SMB1 protocol i think has been dumped as SMB2 is now the main focus.
Hence why it is not working. You could look into NFS exports of your shares.

I've spent many hours trying to do this. Apparently I'm not smart enough to do it. I've gotten this far:

But, I cannot figure out how to get XBMC to connect to it. I have the network location as:

nfs://192.168.0.75:2049/Volumes/Media

but XBMC says it can't connect. But, it doesn't say why.

This is the only think in the XBMC log:

I know that the NFS share is working, because I can mount it from another Mac using the above URL. But, it just doesn't work from within XBMC.

Get nfs manager free trial it is excellent for nfs config. There maybe an option to force nfsv3 or something to get it working . I have all my drives nfs out of lion no problem Si far.

Not sure on port 2049 for nfs either. Nfs will allow full config of nfs so check that out too. Firewalls can block too !

I tried NFS Manager. It's very slick. But, it created the exact same /etc/exports file that I wrote by hand. Works great from other Macs. Fails from XBMC with the identical URL. Port 2049 is correct. It is the default in XBMC and works from other Macs. NFSv2 and 3 are "on" by default.

It didn't work. But, I learned a lot. Which, in many cases, is all I'm after!

Well, it looks as if installing Lion means I'm also going to have to install SAMBA3. I've made a real effort to get NFS working with XBMC, but it just doesn't. Have a look at this post from the XBMC forum:

Help With NFS

Although there are plenty of open source advocates who tout NFS over SMB, I just can't get it to work on the XBMC platform.

Any ideas?

Don't give up on nfs it does work :-)
It is a config problem somewhere. I do not normally put a port number in when connecting to a nfs share . Have you looked here http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title...ilesystem_(NFS) could be helpful.

I tried not using a port number in XBMC. Didn't work.

I know the NFS server is configured properly because I can connect to it in a variety of ways from several platforms; all using the same URL. I can connect from the Finder and from the command line on a MacMini, but not from XBMC running on that same MacMini.

At this point I've invested way too much time getting NFS to work with XBMC. Installing SAMBA3 from MacPorts seems to be an easier, less time consuming process and one which other XBMC users confirms actually works with Lion.

I finally managed to get XBMC to mount my NFS share. Turns out I had to upgrade to the latest nightly builds of XBMC to do it. Unfortunately, NFS is too slow to stream videos. It takes forever for the videos to start playing and they stutter and freeze after a few minutes of play. The XBMC.log has lots of errors like this:

I reverted back to SMB and all is well. Videos start playing instantly and there are no freezes.

So, when I do upgrade to Lion I'll also be installing SAMBA3.

It looks like NFS is a work in progress. Maybe it will be ready for prime time some time in the future.

I went and installed SAMBA3 from MacPorts just to see if I could get it running. I can't. Well, it is running, sort of, but none of the shares are visible to SMB clients.

I have turned off the native SL SMB in the Sharing control panel. Why, then, is the native nmbd process running? (The MacPorts version is the one in /opt/local/sbin/.)

It appears that my config file, which is in /opt/local/etc/samba3/, is not being read.

Oh, well, maybe I should spend some time actually watching videos instead of painfully struggling with things I don't know much about....

NFS is a rock solid protocol IMHO, i have tons of NFS shares on multiple platforms all run as fast as network. Unfortunate that XMBC cannot deal with it. I am sure there are advanced options that could be set on the share to get it to play nice with XMBC but i am unfamiliar with this program and you would be better trawling through their forums.

I'm retired, so I have a lot of time on my hands. Over the last week I've spent many hours, every single day, trying to solve the Lion/SMB/XBMC problem. So far, it's been a total wash.

I had high hopes for NFS, but I didn't realize that the XBMC developers had only recently introduced that protocol. I wasted many hours trying to tweak my configuration to allow XBMC clients to connect, but it wasn't until new builds were released that I could make that happen. Of course, that ended up being futile because the NFS client on XBMC is too slow for video streaming.

I have an NAS device that does SMB, so for a while I thought I'd use that. Trouble is, Lion will probably not connect to that device, so getting media files to it will also be an unsurmountable problem.

My final hope was to figure out how to install SAMBA on a Mac from MacPorts and make it work. That three day effort has also resulted in total failure.

The bottom line is that if I install Lion I lose my home entertainment network.

I'm sure that someone younger and smarter than I could figure it out. But, as for me, a week of failure has yielded nothing more than an increase in Happy Hour alcohol consumption. In fact, time for another whiskey and soda.

I am pretty sure you could transfer the files from Mini to NAS using FTP.
On NAS enable FTP and use something like Cyberduck to connect to NAS and transfer files. Obviously once this is done add NAS to the sources in XMBC.

The whole Samba thing is a pain but on the other side of the coin it is joyous for business setups to see SMB2 on OS X Lion. And as far as running multiple versions etc is a very advanced setup IMO and lots of things to get spot on for it to work.

If you look on the Boxee and XBMC forums, you'll see that many people have gotten this to work. They install SAMBA3 from MacPorts, turn off Windows sharing in the Sharing panel and, BINGO!, it works. No mention at all of any of the problems I've had and no mention at all of conflicts with the native Snow Leopard version of SAMBA.

The instructions people are using are here:

OSX Lion Samba SMB shares broken – XBMC not working

I can't help but thinking that I've missed something in the smb.conf file, but it's very simple and nothing pops out.

The only clue I might have is this. When I look for the SAMBA3 config file, the result has double slashes in the path:

When I look for Apple's smb.conf, the path looks normal:

That path gets hard coded at compile time, so I wonder if there is a flaw in my compile?

Anyway, I'm stumped.