Using Mac OS X 10.7.4 with Windows Server 2008 R2

[mikeruddell2]

Hi,

 

I am using a Macbook Pro running Mac OSX 10.7.4 which is accessing files directly on my fileserver (running Windows Server 2008 R2) but listing directories and copying files from here is very slow. The MacBook is running Parrallels too, inside that (Windows 7) it works perfectly.

 

I've tried a number of suggestions that I've seen online but haven't had much joy.

 

Anyone else had this problem? Never seemed to happen when we had Server 2003 but we recently upgraded everything here...

 

Thanks,

Mike.

[ChrisMiles]

Disabling Receive-Side Scaling and Receive Windows Auto-Tuning have always fixed issues like this for me in the past, its worth a shot.

 

Run on the r2 server:

 

netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled autotuninglevel=disabled

 

and reboot.

[SYNACK]

Disabling Receive-Side Scaling and Receive Windows Auto-Tuning have always fixed issues like this for me in the past, its worth a shot.

 

Run on the r2 server:

 

netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled autotuninglevel=disabled

 

and reboot.

Agreed, you often have to cripple the adaptive features of later versions of Windows to speed up the downlevel clients that can't cope with the network optimisation features.

[mikeruddell2]

Hey Guys,

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm a little reluctant to do this as I only have 1 Mac on the network but over 400 Windows users, and I wouldn't want it to have the opposite effect for them.

 

Coming back to your suggestion though I've been looking at the MTU settings and I keep getting this back until I lower it to 1272 as the buffer size "Packet needs to be fragmented but DF set". I've tried to change the MTU to 1272 on the Ethernet adapter to see if this makes any difference but it won't go lower than 1280 in Lion - has anyone been able to get this lower than 1280? I'd be happier to make this change on the Mac rather than the File Server as it will have less impact.

 

Any suggestions greatly received!

 

Thanks,

Mike.

[mikeruddell2]

Actually, in follow up to this we made the change you guys suggested to one of our other Windows 2008 R2 Servers that's used only by IT.

 

Unfortunately, it still seems to take a long time to list the folder contents in Finder.

 

Do you think the MTU will make a difference or have any other ideas?

 

Thanks Guys

 

Mike

[SYNACK]

They changed the smb client in 10.7 because they had to share and did not want to so it's actually a different version than the earlier ones which can mess differently. You could try checking if the Mac is attempting to use IP6 as they are not fantastic at that, you may also want to investigate disabling smb2 signing on that test server. I would never do this in production though as it degrades security a bunch.

[mikeruddell2]

Does anyone know of any other workarounds for this? It's driving me crazy!

 

I was even looking to see if I can get my shares on Windows 2008 R2 available using AFP rather than SMB but no luck with that either...

 

Surely this must be affecting a lot of other people too? Wondering if it's worth trying to speak to Apple about it?

[mikeruddell2]

I've tried dropping out IPv6 as suggested too, but it's still causing problems.

 

Thanks for the suggestions so far though!

[SYNACK]

Surely this must be affecting a lot of other people too? Wondering if it's worth trying to speak to Apple about it?

It's Apple, good luck, these are the same people who were logging usernames and passwords in plain text to the hd for nearly a month and didn't bother actually checking passwords against AD at all. If you do find something that does work please do post it as solutions to Mac issues are few and far between.

Is there any AV or NPS on the server that might be throttling an untrusted client.

[Marci]

Try manually mounting the samba shares on your Win servers from the command line rather than via the OSX GUI, then retry and see if speed improves. Doing this has been known to fix other issues with connecting to smb2 shares, so may fix speed issues (connecting to my old NAS box at home it certainly does things faster via this method). If things are noticeably faster, mount shares via a shell script at login rather than via profiles / mcx / adding as login item via GUI.

 

sudo mount -t smbfs //server/share /Volumes/mountpoint

 

Don't forget to create an empty folder within volumes first to use as the mount point...

 

Alternatively you can try installing Samba3 from MacPorts... have a look at http://www.johnlarge.co.uk/2011/07/19/osx-lion-samba-smb-shares-broken-xbmc-not-working/ for guidance, altho it deals more with setting shares up from the Mac, you could easily use it to handle your mounts.

 

Lastly, there's the option of switching to NFS (see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd758767(WS.10).aspx) and Netgroups, and connect via that instead.

Edited July 6, 2012 by Marci

[mikeruddell2]

OK - thanks for the suggestions.

 

I've been trying to use NFS and have shared a test folder as ALL MACHINES Read-Write ANSI Root Access Allowed

 

But... whenever I try and connect to this with the mac it's saying that I don't have permission to view that folder. Anything simple that I've probably missed somewhere? NTFS Permissions on that folder are set to Everyone Full Control (this is only for testing at this stage)

 

On another note, I called Apple - no joy "Speak to your Server specialists" was the best I could get....

 

Cheers

Mike.

[morganw]

I had this same problem and ended up having to use AFP shares instead of SMB, the problem then went away. Also tested with NFS and had no speed problems. I believe that OS X will hang trying to resolve ipv6 records, a packet capture should show it waiting on a DNS response. I think I already had the tcp autotune stuff disabled when I had the problem so I wouldn't expect this to fix it, although I first acquired the issue after upgrading from 10.5 to 10.6. By this time iPhoto had been changed to not work on SMB home folders so the decision to switch to AFP was easy to make.

[MacPilot]

I had this same problem and ended up having to use AFP shares instead of SMB, the problem then went away. Also tested with NFS and had no speed problems. I believe that OS X will hang trying to resolve ipv6 records, a packet capture should show it waiting on a DNS response. I think I already had the tcp autotune stuff disabled when I had the problem so I wouldn't expect this to fix it, although I first acquired the issue after upgrading from 10.5 to 10.6. By this time iPhoto had been changed to not work on SMB home folders so the decision to switch to AFP was easy to make.

 

I had the same problem and had installed Thursby Systems application Dave trial version to test for a customer. I found after the trial period I was unable to access my Win Servers but Mac Servers were fine. Once Dave was un-installed they came back. This may also give you some hints as to where some issues may be on your side.You may want to look at some of the apps from Thursby as they are designed for bridging Mac to the Windows environment.

 

2008 MacPro 4tb, 9gb RAM OS 10.75.

 

Win. Servers work fine on all other Macs in office.

[scalia]

Ok,

 

I know it sounds absurd, but I've found out about this workaround in another forum.

 

Just try, what do you got to lose?

 

Go to system preferences on your Mac

Sharing

Select Internet Sharing

Select Ethernet (share your connection from) than select a port that you DON'T USE (To computers using:)

 

It worked for me and I had the same problem as you.

 

Hope it works

 

Rafael Scalia

[Ludwig]

Hi,

I'm experiencing exactly the same issue.

Does anybody came to a production working solution ?

 

Thanks.