A fix for broken Windows' file sharing

Sep 17, '03 10:02:00AM

Contributed by: tifighter

I just worked my way through an interesting ordeal involving Windows file sharing and SMB. I was trying to select 'Windows File Sharing' in the Sharing system pref, but it wouldn't activate. I quickly checked Apple's support page on the issue and found I had already tried all the resolves (reconnecting to network, logging out, restart). I read a recent post on this site about checking the console to catch incoming errors. What I found was the following:

Starting SMB server
/System/Library/StartupItems/Samba/Samba: /etc/smb.conf:
  No such file or directory
So, after a futile Finder search, I used a utility to show hidden files and went hunting for the missing file. What I found where the file was supposed to be was a broken alias to the actual file. I hadn't hunted this deeply into the system before, so I didn't know yet that the actual file was supposed to be here. Well, after doing some research on the internet, I found that this indeed should be here. I'm stumped as to how the actual file was replaced with just an alias.

My first and simplest solution worked just fine: I have OS X installed on my FireWire drive, so I just changed my permissions for the etc folder on the affected volume, moved the clean file from the FireWire drive to the etc folder, and changed the permissions back (note the 'wheel' group). Now everything works fine again, and I even got a confidence boost thrown in.

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030915025154318