Win7, Apple XSAN-based SMB Share Inaccessable, Win7 And SMB Doesn't work?

cide_

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 3, 2004
Messages
235
Hello there,

The company which I work for has an Apple XSAN 2-based NAS, and we have a few edit suites which are direct-fibre 4GBPS to the Server, but for the rest of the office, we have Windows XP machines which connect fine to the SMB-based share on the Apple Xserve's, and always have.

However, since the majority of the company uses Windows PC's, it was inevitable at some point that we have an issue and the issue is now this: Windows 7, which I've installed for a few of the Animators (64-bit) will not, no matter what I've tried, access the damned SMB Share points or the server in general.

What happens is this: The Remote Procedure Call Failed.

I have tried adjusting many settings, which were posted on the web as a resolution for this issue, these include removing credentials from credential manager (If they exist), changing the NTLANMAN authentication to support 56-bit instead of 128Bit, to change to NTLM2.0 Auth, to check the SMB Server settings. (Our server supports 3 different methods of authentication) to no avail.

I have also tried other things, such as trying to connect when bound to our Windows Domain Controller, trying to connect when not bound to a Windows DC, connecting by IP, by FQDN, through Net Use (The old net use trick for forcing mounts no longer works with Windows 7, it does begin to connect to the server but something in the authentication process knocks it out.)

For the time being, unfortunately I am having 3 Windows 7 Users access the company fileserver by using WinSCP. This is not a great solution but it works.

The threads on the net, which I've searched for in google "SMB Share Windows 7 Cannot Access" pulls up alot of results of people having issues but the threads seem to go nowhere, or include solutions that Microsoft has seemingly broken in the past couple months. (IE: Most solution threads are from June-Dec 2009)

I read in a couple threads someone mentioned hearing a PodCast which talked about Microsoft purposely breaking compatibility between SMB, to break interoperability of alternate platforms that do not run Microsoft Windows.

Can anyone help me out, I'm tired of go no where threads.
 
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I read in a couple threads someone mentioned hearing a PodCast which talked about Microsoft purposely breaking compatibility between SMB, to break interoperability of alternate platforms that do not run Microsoft Windows.
Hmm, unlikely. My HTPC running Windows 7 Professional pulls files just fine off of a machine running Ubuntu and Samba. Do you have a support contract with Apple (if you do, I'd call them...)? Barring that, can you call Microsoft support? Are the Windows 7 machines running in a domain?
 
Yeah, I have not only a Support Contract but an Enterprise XSAN Support Contract, I'm thinking of calling them on this but I doubt a Windows Networking issue would fall under their support scope.

As far as the Windows 7 Computers being in a domain, yes, as highlighted in my post, I have tried from the Domain as well as without a Domain prefix. Our apple servers also run an Open Directory server for the apple side of things only, and the SMB domain prefix uses the old 8BIT NETBIOS Name, which is set to the same as our WIndows DC Name, (Minus the .COM Suffix)

Anyway,
Is your Windows 7 HTPC completely uptodate with all Microsoft Updates? (I have tried accessing the SMB Share with a fresh Win7 Install and an Updated One, neither worked.)

What version of SMB Services are running on your 'Nix box? I know Apple SMB Services are based on the latest stable release at the time, but Apple is known not to roll out SMB Updates as often as they should... So I'd like to compare what SMB build we have on the server versus yours, perhaps that would help me isolate where our issue is.

Unfortunately its not very easy to update SMB unofficially on the Apple side without breaking something, and I'm not very experianced with compiling my own builds, So I don't want to muck around with it. If it helps anyone reading this, I am running Apple Server 10.5.8
 
I am running Windows 7 within a SMB domain environment (Apple Mac OS X Server 10.4) and I am able to browse the SMB shares off of my Mac as well as read/write just fine. However, I am unable to join the domain. After weeks of searching and contacting apple through our support agreement (we buy a lot from them) it is a known problem that Windows 7 does not play nice with Snow Leopard Server(10.6). There are a few attempts to fix this issue floating around on the net but no of them have worked for me. I am running Windows 7 with all of the latest updates and I still cannot join the domain on my mac server. Also, this goes for Windows Vista as well. Hopefully Apple/Microsoft can get their act together.
 
To update this thread,

Through troubleshooting, I installed SMB Services on another of our MAC Servers, and I was able to access it from the Windows 7 Box that was throwing errors when trying to connect to our main File Server, this ended up working, so it appears it was something corrupt on one of our Apple Xserve SMB Installations.
 
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