John Siu Blog

It suddenly stop working … and luckily I got it fix.

As of 2023, MacOS 13 (Ventura) samba support is stable and work smoothly by just clicking the network section in finder. If you have issue connecting to a samba share, check Samba Config first.

SMB Connection

From time to time I use Finder ⌘-k Connect to Server, or directly from to connect to the few Samba folders I have around, and all of them are saved in following format:

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smb://<hostname>/homes

Then suddenly they all stopped working. I tried a few different ways:

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smb://<user>@<hostname>/homes
smb://<IP>/homes
...

They all refused to connect.

CIFS:// vs SMB://

Following is solution for pre-2020 MacOS and samba setup. Newer samba ( > 4.15.x) may not work with connection using cifs:// from Finder Connect to Server dialog.

I did a lot of searches but they either are old (>1yr) issues or doesn’t apply in my situation.

I came across a few neat tricks like using dtruss, a system call tracing tools. But I don’t want to turn off system integrity protection(required to use dtruss) just because of share folder issue.

Then I tried one last thing, use cifs:// instead of smb://:

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cifs://<hostname>/homes

That works!! I am not sure why smb:// suddenly stop working. But I am happy the share drive is connecting again.