Richard's Notes

Tonight, System Update notified me that OS X 10.6.3 was available for installation.

I took the hint and updated OS X, iTunes and iPhoto. So far, there’s been no downside to the update. In fact, I think there was an upside to the update — after the forced reboot, my little Mac Mini feels a bit quicker than it was before the reboot. Maybe I should reboot more often?

Time Machine is now having the time of its life backing up the 2.5GB of changes to my Mac Mini.

Tonight, I tried to connect my Mac Mini to a Windows 7 share. As you can probably guess, what should have been stupidly simple was frustratingly complex. Thanks Microsoft, for nothing.

As it turns out, Microsoft have tweaked the SMB protocol to make it incompatible with Mac OS X (10.6.2) and samba (3.4.7 on my Debian machine) on Linux. Microsoft have changed a few settings so that Windows 7 network shares no longer behave like the LAN Manager shares of Windows XP.

What you have to do is this … (apologies to person who I copied this from because I did not record their URL)

On your Windows 7 machine, navigate to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Local Security Policy. In the left hand pane, expand Local Polices -> Security Options. In the right hand pane, scroll down to …

• Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level and change the value from Not defined to Send LM & NTLM responses; and
• Minimum session security for NTLM SSP (there’s two entries — one for client and one for server so I changed both) and uncheck the Require 128-bit encryption.

After you make those three changes, reboot.

You should now be able to connect your Mac and Linux machines to your Windows 7 shares.