After the highly-anticipated release of Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6.1), I ran right out and grabbed a copy. I've always had good luck with Apple's updates, so why not?

Everything's been fine for me, except for one thing.

Problem:

When my Macbook pro would go into "sleep" mode and later awaken, I could no longer access Windows shares. ("Samba" shares for my nerdy friends.)

This includes any of the file storage on my trusty ol' windows desktop. (Oh no! Can't get to them mp3's! All my awesomeness is so... removed!)

Whenever I'd do the whole command-K in Finder and clicked on my trusty windows share, it'd just sit there, "connecting..." and never reach the folder.

So, this is a problem and the only cure seemed to be a reboot.

I thought to myself: "A reboot? WTF? I switched from Windows b/c I hated all of the constant rebooting!!!"

Even worse, it was a "hard boot" sometimes b/c the reboot would hang. Ugh. I thought to myself "Not you, Mr Macbook. Not you!!"

There had to be a better fix...

First, I checked online. I checked typical mac forums and support pages. (Nothing good there!)

I googled "Mac SMB sleep" and came up with others having the problem, but no solutions.

Then I tried the usual command line stuff... mount, unmount... no luck.

Finally, I called Apple Support.

I wasn't expecting any help, but what the heck. The tech was friendly but had no clue what I was talking about. (I found that totally odd. Someone's got to be complaining about this!)

However, he did lead me to the following solution...

Solution:

Try setting the "Wake for Ethernet network access" setting on. (That's all.)

One stupid setting and the bug went away.

Here's a more step-by-step guide...

Open the SYSTEM PREFERENCES and then the Energy Saver preferences. 

Under the Power Adapter section, make sure that the Wake for Ethernet network access setting is checked.

Once that's checked, the problem goes away. 

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