I finally pulled the trigger and upgraded my Macbook Pro to El Capitan 10.11.6, from Mavericks. Update went smooth and things seemed to be in normal working order, that is, until I went to hit a shared drive at the office and all hell broke loose. All of a sudden my work shares were throwing error after error. It was working fine a few days ago, what the hell happened? We’ve been tweaking network settings around here so I tried blaming Andrew, who manages the share, to no avail. Once I brought in my Macbook Air from home (still on Mavericks) and connected to the share no problem, I knew it was the “upgrade” that caused issues.

Maybe my Google-fu isn’t what it used to be, but it took forever to find a solution for this. After hours of wasted time, I finally found a working answer buried in an apple.com discussion thread. Coming through in the clutch, user Bob Harris had a few simple commands to run via terminal that returned SMB functionality to what it used to be, without having to tweak settings elsewhere on the machine.

Run the following commands, and you should be good to go! Thanks Bob!

sudo -s
Password: <your account's password here>
echo "[default]"                    >/etc/nsmb.conf
echo signing_required=no >>/etc/nsmb.conf
exit

It’s worth noting that simply changing smb:\\ to cifs:\\ kind of worked. Transfer speeds appeared much slower, but maybe that was all in my head. Either way, I’m happy to have my shares working again as they should.