10.9: Switch the SMB stack to use SMB1 as default

Dec 03, '13 07:00:00AM

Contributed by: MacParc

The new SMB2 stack deliverd with OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) often fails to connect to NAS devices or behaves strangely on server volumes, such as an inability to change file/folder names.

Some possible workarounds are:

First try using cifs:// instead of smb:// to connect to the server volumes.

If that doesn't help, then there is a way to change all connections that use SMB1 by entering this command in Terminal:

echo "[default]" >> ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf; echo "smb_neg=smb1_only" >> ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf
To restore the default SMB2 you simply need to delete the newly created configuration file (nsmb.conf) with the command:
rm ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf
Both workarounds force OS X to use SMB1 as a network protocol instead of the default SMB2 used by OS X 10.9 (Mavericks). While the first is an ad hoc solution the second is a persistent but reversible configuration change (for this user account). SMB1 is slower than SMB2 but stable.

[crarko adds: I don't have a way to test this at the moment, but I do recall reading that people have experienced some of these issues. If someone has a NAS device to test this with (especially if there have been problems) please let us know if either of these fixes helped.]

Comments (12)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20131122083837447