Upgraded to Mavericks and now you can’t connect to your NAS?

UPDATE: Mavericks 10.9.2 was released February 2014 and SMB2 seems to be working fine now. The below steps may not be necessary.

With any upgrade there are bound to be problems.  With the new Mavericks OS update from Apple I have experienced two really unfortunate issues.  1) My copy of Adobe After Effects no longer works and 2) I can’t write to or read any NAS files.  Adobe’s suggested fix is a creative cloud membership at $49.00 a month and all will be peachy…right?  No thanks.

At least I found a “work around” for the NAS issue.  Just in case you’re wondering a NAS is a “NETWORK ATTACHED STORAGE”.  Basically a hard disk (or a series of them) that are connected through the ethernet to your home network so all your devices can access the data.  The problem was very strange at first.  I could see the drive and the folders but as soon as I tried to drill down into them BLAMO! Error-0 message.  That was it, I assumed I was fried until I googled and found out that Mavericks now uses SMB2.  Server Message Block is the way the computer talks to the server (or hard disk) and enables it to send and receive data…there is a version 1 and 2.  I am trying to keep it simple and I may not be absolutely correct but it doesn’t matter.  I am gonna show you a work around until Apple corrects the problem.  I was strolling along fine with SMB (the original 1) and then Apple went and changed their protocol to SMB2.  I used NFS with some success but that broke with the Mavericks upgrade as well.  Thank God for CIFS.  CIFS stands for Common Internet File System and is an application layer protocol.  Don’t worry, I don’t know what that is either.  OK…enough chatter lets fix it.

You will need to re-connect your newly upgraded Mavericks Mac using the CIFS Protocol.  The way you do this…from the home screen you go to the “go” tab and click the drop down menu and at the bottom click on “connect to server”

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and a small window will pop up and look something like this…

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At this point you may already see your server identified something like this  smb://yourservername or serveraddress/somefoldername  mine looked like this:  smb://192.168.1.132/Music – Tower

Now in the address input block retype your server address the same way but make sure it starts of with CIFS instead of SMB

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mine looked like this:  cifs://192.168.1.132/Music – Tower…yours will be different

Now click the add button  (square button with the plus sign)

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Now highlight the address (the one starting with cifs) and select “Connect”

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And you should now see your server folder open like this…

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That’s it…

If you get an error message don’t panic…just check to make sure you’re typing your server address exactly the way it is shown and that it starts off with “cifs” without the quotes.  Try again and it should work.  From the desktop the quick keystroke to get to the server connection is the command-k keystroke.  This will help you get connected with less keystrokes.  There are also ways to have your computer auto connect to your server upon reboot or boot up.  For now I will forgo the auto connect tutorial hoping that this will be a temporary arrangement until Apple fixes on a future upgrade.

This isn’t perfect but it gets you communicating with your NAS…while Apple gets it sorted out.  

“Hey Apple!  What would Steve say?!!”  Get it together, you’re the most valuable company in the world…Act like it.