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One of my clients is a small group of Mac users in a large, Windows-centric company. The Mac’s use ADmitMac to authenticate against Active Directory for user login and to mount network shares. One user suddenly stopped being able to mount network shares, either as a login item or manually using “Connect to Server”. The symptom when logging in is an error dialog, one for each share, that states “tss\_check\_cifs is not running”. I checked Activity Monitor and tss\_check\_cifs what gives? I check the logs, and there’s nothing. I try mounting the share manually, and the symptom then is the blue barber shop bar comes up for a few seconds like normal, then nothing no mount, no error, no log, no anything.

I know it’s not Kerberos or time being off or DNS or anything basic like that, because she can still authenticate and log in successfully. I Google the error and there’s two pages, neither has anything to do with this situation. I go as far as uninstalling and reinstalling ADmitMac with no improvement. Sigh.

Finally, after several hours of pulling my hair out, trying everything short of archive and install, I break down and call Thursby’s tech support (I figure I’ve done enough RTFM’ing at this point) and the first thing off the guy’s tongue is “Oh yah, that’s a bug. Apple changed the way startup items work after 10.4.6. Here’s a link to a pre-release build that fixes the issue.” The official update should be out soon. Until then, here’s Thursby’s number: 1-817-478-5070.

I was setting up a brand new MacBook for a client, and when I tested the .inetloc URL for the client’s network share on one of the MacBooks I got a curious dialog box saying “…blah blah couldn’t mount blah blah unexpected error blah blah…”

I checked the system log and found this:

“kernel[0]: mount version mismatch: kernel=103700, mount=103600″

First I reinstalled Mac OS X 10.4.9 Combo Update and Security Update 2007-004, but no joy. Then I did some investigating and, Voila!, I found that the smb daemon version (in Terminal: /sbin/mount\_smbfs -v) and the smb kext version (System Profiler > Extensions > smbfs) didn’t match, the former being 1.3.6 and the latter being 1.3.7. The fix is to locate mount\_smbfs version 1.3.7 on another machine and then copy it (I used cp -Rpv) to the problem machine, repair permissions and then restart. SMB network shares now mount fine.

Updated: 6/6/2007 I added some Apple script for all you Googlers.

First a little background: for a while now I have been teaching about “URL Fun” in my server classes. Its a pretty universal concept that you find server admins implementing on Mac OS X clients: the idea of an alias, link, script or application that connects to a server on login. The windows folks normally refer to this conceptually as a “Mapped Network Drive” which is why I choose it for the name of this article. I actually find it humorous how often I get asked to make a link to the “x” or “q” drive when doing consulting, its actually a testment to how simple this works on windows, people have no idea of the shares name, just the drive letter ( for better or worse sometimes ). Now there are multiple ways of accomplishing this on OS X ,some are better or fancier then others. All of them try at best to get around requiring users to use “Go” > “Connect To Server”

Part 1: “Aliases” and “Location” Files

Part 2: AppleScript and Login items

Part 3: Shell Scripts and Login Hooks

Part 4: Automounts with Directory Services More »

##Belarc Advisor

Coming from the world of Mac troubleshooting we have been used to being able to quickly get a listing of hardware and software on a system simply by invoking [Apple System Profiler](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_System_Profiler). Microsoft does not provide a way to gather such detailed information with their built-in utilities. If you have ever had to figure out what model of video card or motherboard is in a PC, especially when the drivers aren’t installed yet, you know that you often have to resort to physically inspecting the hardware.

Belarc Advisor is a free (for personal use) utility that runs on Windows that generates a nicely formatted html report detailing the specific hardware and software present on that system. It is compatible with Windows versions from Windows 95 up to Vista. Creating inventories of Windows boxen is a hassle without it.

You can download it here: [http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html](http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html)

##SIW

[System Information for Windows (SIW)](http://www.gtopala.com/) is another good option for gathering system profile information. It doesn’t require the installation of any software which is nice if you are inventorying sytems that you don’t want to modify.

Which one do you need?

It’s easy to get confused as to which version of Creative Suite 3 is the “right” one to order and/or upgrade to. Mainly because there are more options to choose from. For help, there is a product matrix that you can use to see what parts go into each bundle. Here it is:

The CS3 Product Matrix

If you are using Mac OS X Server to host websites, you might want to be able to track how many folks are hitting your websites. One popular and free web statistics package is awstats.

Read on to find out how to setup awstats on Mac OS X Server.

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Since I have seen more and more storage products lately utilizing SATA port multipliers, I decided to do a little research on the topic.

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