Connecting A Mac To A Windows Share

Connecting A Mac to a Windows Share

With the exception of mobile devices we still live in a "Windows World" and with the latest version of OS X comes an update on how to connect to a windows share using SMB2 instead of SMB.

On Mac OS X (Pre Mavericks or 10.9) we connected to a windows share using smb.

From the Finder press the "Command" + "K" keys or go to the "Go" menu and select Connect to Server.  In the server address field put in either smb for pre 10.9 or cifs for 10.9

On a workgroup it looks something like this:

smb://thecomputer/sharedfolder

On an active directory the samba setup it looks more like this

smb://domain.ext/dfs/sharedfolder on a domain using a DFS Share

Now on OS X Mavericks we use cifs to connect to the windows shares.

cifs://thecomputer/sharedfolder on a workgroup and 

cifs://theremotecomputer/sharedfolder$ on a domain using a DFS Share

If you are not logged into the domain or if the share doesn't have anonymous access it will prompt you for a username and password.