I got a MacBook Pro for Christmas (yay!) and I've been arguing with it trying to get Mac OS to mount Windows shares for a full day now. I finally figured it out. My password has a non-alphanumeric character in it, which Leopard doesn't like. I can URL-escape it, though, and it works. Crazy.

When I try to Cmd-K, after entering my password without URI-escaping the offending characters, it brings up the "Connecting To Server" progress bar window, it spins forever, and you cannot dismiss it. If I tried to use mount_smbfs at the command line and include my password in the arguments, I get "failed to initialize the smb library". If I leave out the password and enter it interactively (again, without encoding), it runs without issuing a warning or error, but there is nothing at the mount point, although the OS does think that there is something mounted there, and you have to umount that mount point before trying anything else.

I cannot figure out how to use the command line to mount these shares. Even URI-encoding doesn't work, either putting the password in the command line arguments (where I get a "bus error" — awesome) or entering it interactively.

You can use ruby (which is installed in MacOS by default) to generate the URI encoding:I don't really need any feedback, unless someone here can report this bug to Apple. I mostly am posting so that maybe someone else can find their problem when they search for it.

What character is it in your password giving you the problem? And out of curiosity, do you have a Linux system around to see if it's a Samba or OS X issue?

As far as reporting it to Apple, they accept, but don't respond to all feedback from the public via this page. I've also had success on reporting bugs on their developer mailing threads, and had an engineer work with me on an X11 crash back in the 10.2 days.

Oh, and if your trying to do command line mounts to mount the disk automatically on login, I've found the easiest way is to just connect to the share in in Finder, then drag the disk to the Login Items under the User System Preferences.

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Two things I didn't point out is that the command-line smbclient command works fine from the same box where trying to mount fails, and the Mac upstairs running 10.4 doesn't have the problem.


I'll give it a shot. I tried the developer thing already, but it claimed I needed some sort of login that I didn't have.


Nice tip. Thanks.

I forgot, you will need to register as a developer. It's free and also gives you access to the XCode upgrades and documentation. It can be tied to an Apple ID if you have one already, for iTunes or other various things that they use it for.

I have given this information to my friend at Apple. He says he will report it.

Good catch.

It's already reported as bug ID 5663960.

maybe having it come up more than once in their bugbase means it will get more attention ?