“Apple made a significant change in Samba support in OS X with its move to SMBX in OS X Lion. The changeover continues with the forthcoming OS X Mountain Lion. However, longtime Mac admins will likely find some frustration when dealing with the change,” David Morgenstern reports for ZDNet.
Morgenstern reports, “A recent Apple support note points to the issue: ‘When attempting to use smbpasswd to change a user’s password in Terminal, the command does not work. Instead, the message “smbpasswd: Command not found” appears in Terminal. Resolution To change a user account password in Lion, open the Users and Groups pane of System Preferences. The Mac must be bound to same domain the user belongs to. Additional Information The smbpasswd command line utility is part of Samba, which is not included with Lion or Lion Server.’ …We can hope for improvement in Mountain Lion.”
Read more in the full article here.
Lion really screwed up a few things including SMB. I’m hoping Apple fixes it.
I have a Buffalo NAS that I can no longer connect to since I upgraded to Lion (I held out as long as I could but needed to upgrade before MobileMe was shut down).
My blue-ray player can no longer access shared files on my mac.
Come on Apple, let’s get this figure out.
Mmmm you do get that SMB (server message block) is just a “tech’y” sounding name for “Microsoft Windows Network”.
The SMB branch that Apple is using came from the BSD source trunk. It (SMB) has been reverse engineered in open source projects (as MS (like with everything else) has never published actual specifications)
The MS implementation (of SMB) is chocked full of exploits and insecurities, which they are somehow given a pass on (as seems to be the norm) The reverse engineered BSD version (likely what your buffalo NAS is running) is actually much more secure than the MS version. (but you will have to update it, you “should” be able to get updates from the manuf) I would tell you should replace it with something like a DROBO, if you have the means (as it will be several time the price of the buffalo, which is a very low quality bargain basement piece of equipment)
However it (SMB) is not a protocol you want to use unless you have NO other choice (believe it or not the Reverse engineered open source versions have actually reverse engineered so of the exploits) The “problems” encountered with the current version of Apple’s SMB is likely from them patching discovered exploits, as I can’t imagine then changing it for no reason (no point).
So, be glad apple actually cares enough to keep updating an open source project, it to attempt to keep it free from known exploits.
Lion is a beta. Still.
this is a ridiculous “issue”
SMB support in Lion and Mountain Lion remains excellent.
You can install the SMB smbpasswd command line utility if you really want it. Or use the GUI version as noted in the article.
Apple wants to remove some CLI programs in spots to make it easier for non Unix gurus to admin an Apple computer. Period.
If you are smart enough to know about smbpasswd, then you are smart enough to install that on your Mac if you want to. This is coming from a long time Unix and Linux and Mac user. Meaning: me.
In my opinion, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion and now Mountain Lion remain some of the very best implementations of Unix/Linux on a personal computer in the world. Apple has fixed things and contributed in a meaningful way to a lot of open source projects. My favorite version of Unix/Linux? Mac.
And yes, as someone said, OS X is culled from a the BSD Unix tree.
hi,
so how do you do this?
can you please help me step by step.
i have mountain lion and want to use smb with my xtreamer prodigy, before lion it worked great, but now it doesn’t anymore.
ernest.
Their first mistake was going with Samba instead of Bossa Nova. Just sayin’.