10.6: Force the sytem to use ._ resource forks in SMB mounts

Dec 30, '09 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: ScarabMonkey

Snow Leopard only hintI encountered an issue with a mounted SMB shared drive, where users have always put their files using Tiger or Leopard without any issues. Some software (in this case, ADI Chart) uses the resource fork to store information. In Snow Leopard, SMB mounts are set to use the xattr (extended attributes) feature instead of ._ files for storing the resource fork (a nice change; less clutter).

Unfortunately, this method is not backwards compatible, so our other users are unable to read files uploaded by 10.6, and our 10.6 users cannot read any files already on the server (uploaded by pre-10.6 systems). So, we need to disable this new feature.

It turns out to be related to the 'NTFS Streams' feature of SMB mounts, so if we disable those, then all is well. To do this globally (per machine), we need to create /etc/nsmb.conf, or add the streams line below to the [default] section if the file already exists:

#######
[default]
streams=no
#######
I used Terminal to make this change: sudo vi /etc/nsmb.conf.

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