The case of the suddenly appearing SMB shares

Macs surprise me sometimes, and my hackintosh even more so. It could be a simple way of doing something that just makes sense, or something you would never believe was that easy because other operating systems make it so hard. Occationally something happens that I wasn’t expecting at all.

I just had one of the later. After much time spent searching for solutions to the missing SMB shares in my Mac’s network, they just appeared.

For the past half hour or so all the SMB shares on my home network are visible on the hackintosh and Macbook, and stay visible after connecting (they all work) and disconnecting several times. Nothing has changed in the hardware of the network, no network devices have had firmware updates. 10.5.4 was installed on the Macs a few days ago and made no difference to the network issue.

Just before the appearance of SMB shares I had been trying to get a Windows virtual machine to connect to my Tomtom Go 720 so I could try the Windows version of Tomtom home. The Mac version doesn’t let you view the software in a window on the Mac, so there’s no easy way to take screenshots without resorting to a camera. I know the windows version allowed me to do this previously, so I was trying to get Virtual windows to see the Tomtom unit and play ball. I started with Parallels, but this couldn’t connect to the GPS unit. Virtualbox also failed, so I had fired up VMware, and this was the point at which I noticed the shares. I know these Virtual Machine apps install network drivers, Parallels has Parallels Host-Guest and Parallels NAT visible in the Network section of System Preferences. Could one of them have been interfering with network discovery? I’ll be watching this to see if the shares disappear again, and if so will try uninstalling some VM software.

Update the visible SMB shares lasted until I put the hackintosh to sleep last night. When I started it today the SMB shares are once again gone. The iPod touch and Macbook are still visible, so the next task is trying to figure out what made the shares visible.

Update The shares didn’t appear after a restart so I started uninstalling the VM software to see if there was a conflict. Parallels, Virtualbox and VMware are all temporarily off the hackintosh, but the SMB shares are still not back. Looks like the sudden appearance of the shares was a coincidence.