Access Microsoft Workgroup Shares with OSX

Set the workgroup

• Apple -> System Preferences -> Network (icon) -> Advanced (button) -> WINS (tab)
• NetBIOS Name: set the name your computer will appear as on the windows network
• Workgroup: set at your windows workgroup name

CIFS is roughly the same as SMB version 1 (it's more complicated than that, but they're close enough for our purposes). Apple's implementations of SMB version 2 (introduced in OS X v10.9) and version 3 (OS X v10.10) were a bit buggy, at least at first. If you use an "smb://" URL in the connect dialog, it'll use the newest version that both the server and client support, and if you're still seeing weird behavior from that... then you can use "cifs://" to force it back to the old version 1 protocol, which might fix it

UNRESOLVED: SMBv1.0 NAS cannot be opened on Catalina. (still things to try...)

"There was a problem connecting to the server"

"The version of the server you are trying to connect is not supported"

UNRESOLVED: Catalina no longer supports classic version of AFP.

SUCCESS.

Install muCommander. Tested on Catalina using muCommander version 0.9.5

If installing from muCommander web site and not the Apple App Store it is necessary to override security permissions for installation.

STATUS SUCCESS! muCommander uses a working implementation of CIFS / SMBv1.0 and can access shares on older NAS devices from a Macintosh computer.

See also Macintosh on a Windows Active Directory Domain