macOS Sonoma/Tahoe updates cause frequent SMB disconnects
Ever since upgrading to Sonoma, I've suffered disconnects when trying to connect to my NAS with SMB. My setup is a MacBook Pro with a USB ethernet dongle. I access my share through a symlink in my home directory. I did a few things to try to improve things:
- Changed dongle with a different chipset
- Upgraded my NAS
Eventually, things seemed to stabilize a bit.
After upgrading to Tahoe, the issue was definitely occurring much more frequently, almost on every wakeup from sleep and sometimes also in use. A Command+K always fixed the issue. While researching the issue I came across this thread. I thought Automount is exactly what I need! So I set out to create the share in my home directory figuring out that auto mount would... well, auto mount when the volume disconnects and I try to access it.
This did not spare me from the disconnects, or rather it manifested itself differently. As soon as I notice that the files can no longer be accessed, I go to my home directory and the folder itself is no longer visible in the Finder. When trying to `ls` through the terminal, I get a `permission denied` and `fts_read: Permission denied`. If I try to `sudo cd` into it, the common will succeed, but it won't actually go to the directory. It can be listed through `sudo ls` though. mount shows the mount as mounted.
There is one way to fix it though. As soon as I unmount it with `umount`, autoumount reconnects immediately and it works. To me, this seems like an issue with macOS. It's as if there is a disconnect between what the filesystem and the network stack believe the current situation is, which makes me suspect something in the kernel.
Things that I've tried:
- Wifi or ethernet
- Different SMB Server (TrueNAS and a Raspberry Pi)
- Automounter
The issue is definitely reproducible. What I'm seeing might be a red herring, but I feel this might be related to the frequent disconnects everybody is seeing, it just manifests itself strangely because of my use of autmount.
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 26.1