Weird smbd crashes. Is Ventura unusable as a file server?
I know you cool kids all do NAS and cloud storage nowadays, but I’m old school. Since forever I’ve had a server in my closet, running basic services such as local file sharing, a couple of Linux VM’s for webservers and VPN, torrent client, Homebridge etc.
My trusty server, a Mac Mini 2014 with only 4 Gb of RAM has started to show its age, not least as it cannot be upgraded past Monterey. When I got hold of a discarded laptop with an Intel Core i5 Gen 8 and 16 Gb of memory, I figured it was time for an upgrade.
However, now I’ve almost given up, as the SMB server crashes constantly!
You see, I have some external USB3 disks (APFS formatted) connected to the computer and I was hoping to do some file sharing to my other computers in my house. I can connect, mount and browse without issues. However, when playing a video file and jumping around a little in the timeline, suddenly the player just stops and jump to the end of the file.
To figure out if it was client or server issue, I looked at the console messages. Pretty quickly I realized that it must be the server. In the server console I see a whole bunch of smb errors seconds before and after the video stops playing. Playing files from the local SSD does not seem to produce crashes, at least not in my testing.
The smbd process restarts, and while I can (most often) restart the video, the interruptions are not acceptable. I poked around and followed the breadcrumbs in a vain attempt to figure it out. But just about here is where it becomes pretty obvious that only my mother really thinks I’m a hacker. Anything that uses hexadecimals is lost on me, although I have to stress how much a revere the wizards who dare to tread those magical and mystical lands. Sorry, I got a little bit off topic.
In the server console log (below), after filtering for “smb”, you can follow how the daemon (PID: 1788) is pronounced dead. It’s also the usual stew of messages from wherever, along with what appears to be quite esoteric error messages, as I can’t find any mentions of them anywhere else on the interwebs.
CONSOLE LOGS:
The crash logs it so gracefully created can be found below. And yes, there is one for every crash, but I included the one.
CRASH REPORT:
So, I guess my question is: what should I do? I don’t want to bore you with what I already have tried. Even before I narrowed it down to an smbd issue. So much snake oil on the internet. I’ve tried turning file sharing on and off. Someone said there had to be a restart while off. So I tried that too. I’ve tried disabling IPv6. I’ve messed with settings to disable SMBv1 and force SMBv3. Until someone said it should be vice versa. Replaced USB cables, although the files play fine locally. I’ve trashed plists and interfaces. Started over. Reinstalled. Etcetera. And now I’m at a loss.
I should also add that the external disk(s) works without issues connected to my old server, running Monterey.
I can see that com.apple.root.default-qos is mentioned as an offender. But why, and what can I do about it?
Can somebody make sense of the logs? Anyone?
