Zenji Web Development

Since I got the Mac a couple of months ago there is one thing that keeps bugging me; connecting to my server is not particularly reliable. Dropped connections seemed to be pretty much guaranteed half way through a job that involves anything more than a couple of Mb of data. Since I tend to use the server for automated backups of my other machines it just hasn’t been happening for the Mac. Slowly I’ve got more and more concerned about having no regular backups.

A chance comment I came across whilst Googling for something else seems to have cleared up the issue. It seems my technique of using the Network utility in the Finder was the main issue. It is certainly the simplest option and most people seem to use it for that very reason. The trouble is it doesn’t always get the protocol right. You can check this by creating a connection to your server (in the finder choose Network and then browse to your server and connect to a share), selecting the new connection and then checking the info (Apple key and I). Mine shows up as:

cifs://my_server/backup

Since my Linux server uses Samba for the network shares it’s far better to connect using the Samba protocol:

smb://my_server/backup

The easiest way to set this up is through the ‘Connect to Server’ utility in the Finder. This also stores your server connections for easy future access. You should be able to simply type the connection string in and then connect at will. Hopefully you’ll see a much more stable connection in future.

(An extra tip - once you have the connection set up you can automatically connect at login by adding it to the list in System Preferences->Accounts->Login Items)