Bring the Noise!!

It's not elegant, but it works just the same. To access your NAS via SMB in Leopard try the following:

smb://username@IP-address

That should give you a password prompt and you should be able to connect from there.

If you are like me and got used to the SMB connection "just working" once you set it up under Tiger, you've probably forgotten your username by now. You should be able to find it in Keychain Access under the Passwords Category. As for the actual password itself, you're on your own. Try looking on that sticky note under your keyboard. (If you actually looked under your keyboard and actually found a sticky note containing your password, please slap yourself for me. Hard.)

Just so you can appreciate what a big deal it was for me to get this connectivity back, here is my setup: 

NAS containing movie library and entire iTunes library wired to Airport Extreme

Speakers wired to Airport Express

Airport Express wireless to Airport Extreme

MBP wireless to Airport Extreme

Now I have movies and music wherever again.  I love this shit.

It is all gone quiet, too quiet.

I have all of my music stored on a SimpleShare NAS that I access as a network drive through SMB. Everything worked fine in Tiger. Unfortunately, there is something freaky going on with SMB access in Leopard.

I've tried messing with my Mac's firewall and network settings, the Airport Extreme's settings, and anything else I can think of. No success so far. I suspect this may have something to do with Apple pulling the wireless Time Machine support, but I've got no fix yet.

Until then, its oh so quiet around here. 

Get the APE off your back and overcome the Leopard "blue screen" startup hang

You've installed Leopard and gotten the "Install Successful" screen, but on the first (and after every following and increasingly frustrating) startup attempt, all you get is a little hard drive activity and a blank blue screen with the mouse cursor in the upper left corner -- not quite a blue screen of death, more of a blue screen of chemically-induced coma, but just as annoying.

This is probably a fairly simple startup problem and not a my-entire-system-just-ate-itself install problem, so don't freak out just yet. Remember all those cool Unsanity haxies you installed back in the day?  They might not be playing so well with Leopard.  Basically, you need to get rid of the Application Enhancer (APE), but that's hard to do when your machine is stuck in an unresponsive haze.

The fix I used comes from here.  If you follow the link, the instructions are a little more detailed.  The long and short of it is this:  

1) Find a working Mac with a firewire port.

2) Connect the working Mac to your Mac via firewire (If your Mac doesn't have firewire I have no idea how to help you).

3) Restart your Mac in firewire target-disk mode (hold down T while starting up).

4) Using the working Mac, find the following files on your Mac and pull them to the trash.

/Library/Preference Panes/Application Enhancer.prefpane

/Library/Frameworks/Application Enhancer.framework

/System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Application Enhancer.bundle

/Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist

5) Empty the trash and unmount the firewire drive for your Mac on the working Mac.

6) Unplug the firewire cable and restart your Mac.

7) Everything should be fine.

This worked for me, but your mileage may vary if you have other haxies installed.  Check out the compatibility list from Unsanity for more info.  Good luck.

UPDATE:

If you are a l33t h4x0r, you can do this:

1)  Boot your Mac into single user mode (hold down command-s while starting up)

2)  Get into the Terminal and delete the following using these commands:

rm -rf /Library/Preference Panes/Application Enhancer.prefpane

rm -rf /Library/Frameworks/ApplicationEnhancer.framework

rm -rf /System/Library/SystemConfiguration/Application[no space here, it's just that my blogger formatting sucks]Enhancer.bundle

rm -rf /Library/Preferences/com.unsanity.ape.plist

3) Restart

Use these at your own risk.  If you don't know what you are doing with the command line, don't do anything with the command line.

Good luck.

Leopard is coming soon.

Getting pretty excited for Leopard. So excited I think I'm going to spring for iLife '08 tomorrow just because of the expected synergy between the two. I'm still fence-sitting about upgrading to QuickTime Pro 7. My gut tells me there's another version of that just around the corner.