Ellipsis

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!