Today I have really started thinking about apple computers again due to the latest incident. This time we’re talking about windows shares in a cooperated network, called smb or samba shares in combination with an active directory. The task itself shouldn’t be that hard as it was just accessing a windows share on a remote server – but that’s where the story begins. Things didn’t work as expected.

As I’m used to Linux systems, my first click was firing up the Console windows for accessing the bash shell. As the problem is smb related, it’s something the kernel might know something about. For accessing the kernel log, I used ‘dmesg’, which showed us the following error message:

smb_smb_negotiate: server configuration requires packet signing, which we dont support
mount_smbfs: error from NetrShareEnum call: exception = 382312522
smbfs_smb_qfsattr: (fyi) share 'NTFS', attr 0x700ff, maxfilename 255
smbfs_aclsflunksniff: group sid S-1-5-21-2788770225-3767355608-264476496-513 didnt map


The problem so far: Windows does packet signing for preventing a security breach with its network shares. Searching for a solution, I have stumbled about the newest OSX version which would be one option to handle the problem as disabling packet signing would degrade network security at the whole network. From my point of view, apple security looks more and more like a myth to me.