You may recall my terrible trinity of problems.

1. My Windows roaming profile won’t sync when I log out.

2. Windows tells me my password has expired (which it hasn’t) when I log in.

3. I can’t mount a Windows share from a UNIX machine when the Windows server is part of a domain. I can mount a non-domain Windows share, I can mount a Samba share and I can connect to a domain share with smbclient but not with mount.cifs, smbmount or mount_smbfs.

Problem 1 was fixed a while ago. Problem 2 is still a thorn in my side but problem 3 has now gone away.

I decided I’d have yet another look on Google for details of the problem. I got halfway through typing in my search query when I realised I couldn’t remember the error code mount.cifs gave when failing to mount a Windows machine. So I tried to mount from my Linux box.

And it worked.

Then I tried from my iMac. It worked again.

I have no idea why but it works. Maybe Microsoft patched something with a recent Windows fix. Maybe the Samba team patched something in Samba 3.0.28, to which I upgraded only yesterday. Maybe it was Solar flares.

Whatever the reason, I’m happy.

For now.