Network Problems Abound in Leopard

posted in: Sage Advice | 0

One thing that I have noticed with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is the improvement in speed with networking, especially with SMB shares. I mount a couple shares from a Windows 2000 server using SMB. Under Tiger, accessing these shares was pokey, at best. The connections were reliable, but viewing a folder that contained lots of files in icon view resulted in a slow screen draw.

Leopard has improved upon this greatly and the icons are downright snappy when they draw. Copying is also much improved. BUT, and this is a big one, I have had to restart at least three times in the past three weeks to gain access to my shares. And in one case, my Mac totally crashed with the multi-language “You must restart your Mac” message while trying to access a share. So while speed has been improved, reliability has not. The typical symptoms are that the shares may disappear from the sidebar and trying to access the share results in no response at all and trying to log back into the server results in the crash.

Other users are reporting loads of problems with wireless networking, especially accessing Airport networks. The Apple Discussion Boards are tracking hundreds of posts of users who are having trouble with their Airport networks. We don’t use airport base stations and our Leopard Mac isn’t airport-equipped so we can’t comment on this.

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