Mac OS X cannot connect to Windows 7 machine

Question

I have a Mac OS X (Snow Leopard 10.6.6) setup on a network with several Windows 7 machines.

When trying to place a large file on a Windows share the connection to the Windows share is lost and I am unable to reconnect until I reboot the Mac. I know this is on the Windows side because the Mac can connect and transfer files to Server 2008 and XP without issue. Looking in the log file I see this message:

SharePointBrowser::handleOpenCallBack returned 12

I have tried restarting the com.apple.netauth.sysagent service but that did not resolve the situation. I can do an nslookup to the Windows 7 machine, but trying to ping the machine by hostname always gives a hostname lookup failure (I can ping via IP address).

I cannot connect to the machine via IP adress either.

Answer 1

I had the same error from Snow Leopard when using a Win7 machine for light file serving duties at home. The Win7 machine had some errors in the event log:

Source: srv
Event ID: 2017
Level: Error
The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because
the server reached the configured limit for nonpaged pool allocations.

With that error noted, a search brought me to a solution:
http://alan.lamielle.net/2009/09/03/windows-7-nonpaged-pool-srv-error-2017

Set the following registry key to ’1′:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\LargeSystemCache

and set the following registry key to ’3′:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters\Size

Explanation of what the reg keys do: http://www.decuslib.com/decus/vmslt99a/nt/tips.txt (scroll to bottom)

Thanks to Alan LaMielle and Mark Russinovich.

Answer 2

Most problems situated with being able to connect or not to a windows computer could have the problem lying directly in-front of your eyes, try disabling the firewall, and if that doesn't work, pretty much trial and error until you provide enough detail and information to solve this computer quarrel.

Answer 3

I fixed this issue by using the smb protocol. In Finder, you push Ctrl+K and a box will pop up. You then type the following:

smb://Local.Ip.To.Windows7.Machine

This will open up a dialog that will let you select which shared directory you would like to access. From there you can move around in any of the shared folders through Finder.

Be sure that you have the folders you want shared selected as shared in Windows 7. If they're not shared, you won't be able to access those files/folders. It's a bit of a hassle, but it's the only way I found to work around this issue.