I’ve been playing around with my new Apple Mac PowerBook and OS X - mostly having fun, finding it quite a liberating experience after 15 years of Windows, although I have the odd gripe (like… I have to pay extra money to watch a video full-screen?!? Go fuck yourself Steve Jobs!)

This morning, I’ve been trying to access files from my two PCs downstairs. Went to finder, “Go” menu, “Connect to Server”. The first machine I tried connected fine, no problem. The second just was not having it; despite trying several times, using server name or IP address, rebooting the server, etc, Finder kept coming up with “The Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in ’smb://servername’ could not be read or written (Error code -36)”.

I found an Apple technote about Error 36, to do with plaintext vs. encrypted passwords, but this clearly wasn’t the same problem as the console messages I got were different. Mine read:


mount_smbfs: error from NetrShareEnum call: exception = 382312522
mount_smbfs: error from NetrShareEnum call: status = 0×00000005
mount_smbfs: unable to list resources: raperr = 5 (0×0005)


So I finally tried another workaround: instead of connecting to the top level of the computer, I connected directly to the share I wanted, i.e. smb://servername/sharename rather than just smb://servername. Worked a treat! So now I have all my PC documents available from my Mac laptop!