Posts Tagged Mac OS X
Samba access problem with Mac OS X 10.6+
This is a problem I encountered when I upgraded Mac OS X from the version 10.5 (Leopard) to 10.6 (Snow Leopard). One of my friend also got a similar problem when she upgraded to the version 10.7 (Lion).
This issue was affecting the access to the network shares set up with Samba (version 3.0.24) on my D-Link DNS-323. For some reason, I wasn’t able to authenticate on the shares as soon as I upgraded to Snow Leopard!
Here is the error message I was getting:
After browsing a few forums on the web, I finally found a solution. 
I simply had to change the security mode in the Samba configuration file (smb.conf) to read:
security = USER
Note that this property can be found under the [global] section.
For more information about the Samba security mode, please read the following article by Jack Wallen:
Understanding Samba security modes
Permissions ignored with Samba
After the issue regarding the ntpd process, I encountered another problem with my D-Link DNS-313. This time it was about permissions problem using Samba.
Because I have multiple user accounts sharing the same data, I added the following lines into the Samba configuration file (smb.conf):
create mask = 0774 directory mask = 0775 force create mode = 0774 force directory mode = 0775
With these properties, a user will have the permission to read any files created by another user and will also be able to edit them if both users are part of the same group.
However, it appeared that these properties had been ignored by Samba! 
Please note that the client was a Mac OS X 10.6.6 (Snow Leopard) and the Samba version on the NAS was 3.0.25a.
After some googling on the web, I found the following explanation on the contribs.org forum:
Samba 3.0.2x has the ‘unix extensions’ option set to ‘on’ by default. This allows Unix users who write to the Samba shares to set their own permissions bits. Mac OS X up until now has never attempted to do this, but from Leopard, any directory that gets created on a Samba share, get chmod’ed through this Samba extension.
Alright, this is clear enough! This means that we have to set the ‘unix extensions’ option to ‘no’ in our Samba configuration file:
unix extensions = no
The problem should be gone after restarting Samba.