Even though I’m a convinced OS X / Mac user when it comes to my development machines, sometimes I unfortunately have to connect to resp. mount Windows shares via Samba. That could be a remote Windows server at the client’s end I’m connecting to via VPN or just a share in a virtual machine in VMWare Fusion on my Mac.

Sometimes though unmounting the share/drive in Finder leads to a weird scenario that it unmounts fine but when I try again to mount the same or a different drive via Samba, I get a totally arbitrary error message saying nothing but “please check the IP address, bla bla bla”. Obviously the IP address is fine, rebooting the VM doesn’t help either.

The log files show something like:

<timestamp> /System/Library/CoreServices/NetAuthAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/NetAuthAgent[54255] Enumerate shares failed!: syserr = Operation timed out

You’ve got two options here – reboot your Mac (annoying) or enter the world of Terminal.app and run either:

killall NetAuthAgent

or

kill -9 <processID>

(you might need to do this as a super user depending on your setup)

After that – you’ll be able to hook up to Samba shares again just fine.