Samba share disappears

[potenuse]

Hi all,

Took me a while to solve this one so thought I'd post.
I've done a few recent upgrades and one of my macs could no longer see the samba shared disks on the other, or rather, they would show up and then disappear when I clicked on them.

After a lot of trial and error, I discovered the problem was caused by phantom samba shares in the /var/samba/shares/ folder. To fix this:

1) On the mac that hosts the disappearing shares open terminal and type

ls /var/samba/shares/

2) Now compare this to the list you see with finder from another mac
3) If the list you see in Step 1 is longer than in Step 2 remove the extra ones as follows:
4) Create an empty folder on the desktop with exactly the same name as the "phantom" share (in my case this was DATA-1)
5) Apple - I (for Infos) and share this folder (checkbox half way down)
6) Uncheck the box again and verify that the share has vanished by doing step 1 again
7) Repeat until all phantoms are gone

I suspect that the phantom shares are causing the other to disappear through some sort of refresh bug - in any case, removing them solved it for me.

Cheers,
Potenuse