SMB issues with Lion Mac OS X 10.7

This is more of a rant than anything. So be prepared.

As you may (or may not) know, my day job is in IS at a fairly large regional hospital group. I was brought on a couple years ago because of my experience with Mac OS X, and their desire to evaluate and deploy Mac systems in a limited fashion. I put in the effort and legwork to get Macs integrated as much as I could, with what support I had from the leadership. For around 2 years it worked OK. Then came the Lion.

Mac OS X 10.7 has issues here. I'm not sure if it has issues everywhere, I guess it depends on how your environment is built, and whether your users are actually using the environment and not just the computer. The first (and biggest) problem is that when Mac OS X 17.0, 10.7.1, and 10.7.2 connects to an SMB share, it doesn't actually mount the share you requested. What Lion does, is parse the share path, and actually mounts the directory containing the share you want to mount. That seems to be confusing (at least to AppleCare), so allow me to explain.

If you want to mount the share myhomedirectory from your SMB server, you enter the path:
smb://mycompanyserver/homedirectories/myhomedirectory
In Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6, the following things happened when you authenticated to that share:
1. SMB mounted the device /Volumes/myhomedirectory
2. The sidebar shows mycompanyserver under shared devices
3. Finder opens a folder of myhomedirectory
4. Mac OS X display the share myhomedirectory on the desktop (if this item is visible).

In Mac OS X 10.7 the following things happen:
1. SMB mounted the device /Volumes/homedirectories
2. The sidebar shows mycompanyserver under shared devices
3. Finder opens a folder of myhomedirectory
4. Mac OS X display the share homedirectories on the desktop (if this item is visible).

OK, now read through those again. When I was on the phone with Apple, they explained that they had changed the behavior of SMB to mount the root share. Except that's not what they are doing. They are mounting the directory one level above the share point you attempt to access.

This introduces all sorts of problems which may be security issues, or just user-friendliness, depending on your environment. In my environment, no-one has any access to homedirectories - so the links on the desktop, in volumes, and in the sidebar are all useless. The only thing useful is the Finder window that opened, but only if you leave it in List, Cover Flow or Icon view, because if you change to Columns it breaks and you can't see your directory contents anymore. If for any reason you close that Finder window, you have to use Go -> Go to Folder... to reopen it.

Of course I opened a ticket with Apple, and got it escalated, but I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime, we get the following issues in our environment:

• When a user logs into a Lion system, they are presented a dialog listing all the share points in the directory where their network home folder resides. They have to navigate to the network home folder, select it and then continue before the system will log in.
• If a user connects to a network share, they have to be very careful about the application they attempt to use, because most applications won't be able to parse the path if the entire directory tree isn't at least readable by all.

So Lion is effectively broken in my environment. Which, by the by, has about 15,000 PC systems and about 50 Macs. Which leads to tomorrow's post: On "Personal Technology" and the "Next Big Thing".