A Yuletide Apocalypse

So I found a few threads on the net that described similar problems and how to fix them… Basically, due to either the latest Apple security update, or my running Monolingual, there was a conflict between the mount_smbfs and smbfs.kext versions. The solution? Use your OSX disc to extract and reinstall the previous version of the smbfs Kernal extension (1.6 rather than 1.7).
The problem? I don’t have my disc with me here at school.
The solution? Use the 10.4.8 combo updater. (It worked!)

I wasn’t sure which to update, so I went ahead and reinstalled smbfs.kext and AppleSMBios.kext, and I reinstalled mount_smbfs just for good measure.

Then, after a restart, I get an Error -36 blah blah could not be read or written…
Wtf?
After checking the Console, I saw this error message:
mount_smbfs: /sbin/kextload command failed, exit status 1: Operation not permitted
mount_smbfs: SMB filesystem is not available
Now, the ingenious bit that made me feel like a l337 h4rdc0r3 h4xx0r…
>>sudo /sbin/kextload -t /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext
kextload: extension /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext appears to be valid
kextload: /System/Library/Extensions/smbfs.kext loaded successfully
The -t is just to print diagnostics…
So now it works!!! Yay!
Now, why couldn’t it load the kext on its own? That, I don’t understand. Maybe the SMBios thing shouldn’t have been reverted? I’ll try putting back the old (newer) version and see what happens…

But at least I can mount my shares again!

Update: I replaced the SMBios thing, but I think what ended up fixing it was that I went into /System/Library/Filesystems/SMB.fs/ and edited the plist files to match the version I had rolled Samba back to (1.3.6). Or something. I know I messed around with SMB.fs, since the error above says “filesystem unavailable” which meant there was something funky goin on with SMB.fs…. (what help I am… ! But hey, its late and I have two finals due tomorrow…. AHHHHHH)

Update: So everything turned out fine, and I didn’t even have to do an archive and install! What did I do? I borrowed a friend’s MacBook Pro install discs and forced it to “update” my installatin of osx. The initial installer app runs a test to see if it can install Tiger, which my computer failed. So, I had to dig into the installer and select the package manually, and install from there (this is after having started up from the cd). I believe I had to use the command line to actually open Installer.app so I could install it manually, but I forget. And pacifist doesn’t work in that context because a bunch of stuff it needs aren’t loaded. So after installing over things, and then perhaps also using Pacifist to do some more forced installing for selected directories that were suspected of giving errors earlier, just to be safe, everything was back to normal. Yayyyy!
[tags]troubleshooting, OSX[/tags]