Mac Finder and smb:// error -36 -- Help from Samba 10

Posted by Peter Burkholder Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:39:00 GMT

When trying to connect to a remote CIFS share today using the Mac OS X 10.4.10 Finder, I was getting the very unhelpful error:

The finder cannot complete the operation because some data in “smb://myservername” could not be read or written. (Error code -36)

Googling for this (or GoodSearching, in my case) didn’t turn up much of use. The system logs in /var/log/* weren’t of much help either. Far more useful was the smbclient command, which is part of the Samba installation. E.g.:

$ smbclient //server.addomain.univ.edu/Admin -W ADDOMAIN -U USERNAME
Password: 
session setup failed: NT_STATUS_PASSWORD_MUST_CHANGE

Oh! Excellent! That’s right, I’ve not used that password in eons, and it’s expired. Thank god I didn’t waste my time chasing red herrings. Now, how do I change my password from a Mac?

Being a general Windows nincompoop, I actually called technical support first off, but that wasn’t any help. Fifteen seconds of pondering, and 1 minute of reading the man page, and I came up with this:

$ smbpasswd -r aaddomain.univ.edu -U USERNAME
Old SMB password:
New SMB password:
Retype new SMB password:
Password changed for user USERNAME

All done!

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  1. Ted Wood about 1 year later:
    Unfortunately, even with the correct credentials, error -36 can happen quite often. One blogger suggested it was NETBIOS knocking on the firewall. I'm still trying to sort this out, as it only happens half of the time for me.
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