Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist
6 October 2006
Filed under:Call for help at2:07 pm

Something in my configuration changed a while ago and now whenever I try to connect to Windows drives (either my PC at home or the network drive at the LSE) I get an error -50. Appleerrorcodes tells me this means “Error in user parameter list” but that doesn’t actually mean anything to me! I tried re-authenticating but the error message remains the same (and it doesn’t seem likely the keychain entries for two different drives would be wrong).

Moreover I can’t now connect to the shared printers at the LSE or at home. I connect to the Internet fine (thankfully)! I fear I must somehow have messed up SAMBA on my machine at a low level.
I don’t know what to do next. I will book an appointment at the Apple “Genius Bar” and see what they say but any other ideas would be welcome.

2 Comments »

  1. How do you connect to the drives? Do you use hard-coded “smb://” URLs?

    I assume you are using Mac OS X at this point. To get more meaningful error messages you can use the Terminal and try out the mount_smbfs command. It might spit actually useful error messages at you.

    I find the way that Apple’s Cocoa-wrapping of Unix tools de-techifies error messages etc frustrating, because it often hides this kind of useful information.

    Of course, if mount_smbfs also says “error in parameter list” then all that’s left is to download the source for mount_smbfs (which you can do – it’s open source) and see for yourself what’s going on. This last step is certainly something you could never do on Windows. 🙂

    Comment by Reid — 6 October 2006 @ 3:19 pm

  2. Yes I am using hard-coded smb:// urls. I can’t seem to get the syntax right for mount_smbfs – mount_smbfs -I [PC’s IP address] doesn’t seem to work though I was previously able to mount smb://[PC’s IP address].

    I do not alas expect to be able to download the source and fix it – that’s what I trust you open source programmer types to do for me!

    Comment by David Brake — 6 October 2006 @ 3:40 pm

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