Having my business MacBook running on to the most recent beta of macOS Mojave – after the initial struggles – I stumbled on an issue with connecting one of our Windows fileserver shares using the SMB (Samba) protocol today. The issue is, that the smb://-address is simply not being connecting when trying to do so using “Connect to Server”-dialogue in Finder (CMD+K): the “Connecting to smb://server…“-dialogue just staying in progress forever.

macOS Mojave - Connecting to Server Dialogue

Fortunately I was able to find a workaround using the Terminal.app in macOS Mojave, which allowed me to successfully connect, mount & exchange files with our internal Samba fileshare.

Here’s how you can connect to an smb://-fileshare using the Terminal in macOS Mojave

Using this method, I was successfully able again to mount our corporate Windows fileshares, or any of it’s particular subdirectories, under macOS Mojave 10.14 Beta (18A384a).

  1. First you’ll have to create a target folder, where the fileshare will be mounted to, as a network volume, later
    • Open for example your User folder (CMD+Shift+H) and create a new, empty folder named “networkshare”
  2. Now launch the Terminal.app from within the Utilities-folder (find it using CMD+Shift+U in Finder)
  3. Use the following command to mount the SMB fileshare – or one of it’s subdirectories – into your previously created “networkshare” 
    mount_smbfs //your_username@windowsserver.company.home/networkshare ~/networkshare
  4. Browse to your User folder – or wherever you created the “networkshare” folder – and voilà: your SMB fileshare should be properly mounted!

 

How to manually disconnect a connected smb://-fileshare from macOS Mojave

This step is very simple and still works like when a fileshare was connected using the regular “Connect to Server”-dialogue in Finder:

  1. Either, you simply click the small “Disconnect”-icon next to the fileshare in a Finder’s window sidebar
  2. or you can do this as well using the Terminal.app by entering the following command: 
    umount ~/networkshare

 

Mentionable sources

Kudos to Der Flounder and his blogpost here for the instructions, which turned out to still work seamlessly under macOS Mojave nowadays.

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4 thoughts on “Connecting an SMB fileshare in macOS not working? Here is a workaround.”

  1. funny enough my password is not accepted anymore and I am stuck with: “mount_smbfs: server rejected the connection: Authentication error”… From Windows7 PC same password works… 🙁

    Reply

      1. That’s really odd. One thing I can think of is that your password uses special characters which the Terminal.app is not interpreting correctly? Try typing the password in a plain Terminal.app window to check if this might happen.

  2. I still have the same issue, the password is not accepted, not in Finder and not via Terminal. It works well on Windows and Macs with OS Version below Mojave and I can connect to the same share with the same user via AFP. I want to get rid of AFP and use SMB only..

    Reply

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