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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.