Getting Around Incorrect Password When Trying to Enable SMB on Mac OSX

So with my files halfway transferred, I began to setup file sharing on Mac OSX Lion. Things were pretty straight forward. Go to Sharing; enable File Sharing; add the directory I want to share; modify the access rights. To enable SAMBA, I just had to go into Options… and check Share files and folders using SMB (Windows) and select the Windows account(s) I want to have access to the file shares.

My HTPC uses a different login and I wanted to add a sharing only account to the access list. Simple enough. Click the + button and set the username and password and also enable it for SMB. But then I kept getting this error:

Mac OSX SMB Incorrect Password

To enable file sharing using SMB for “login”, enter the password password for that account.

Incorrect password

I’ve double checked to make sure I had the right password and even tried deleting the account and creating a new one, but couldn’t understand why it kept thinking my password was incorrect. One thought was maybe sharing only accounts couldn’t have SMB access? So I started searching for a solution online. A couple people seem to have hit into this issue, but no one seemed to have found a solution.

Solution:

To fix this, instead of creating the new account inside the Sharing window, go to Users & Groups and create a new Sharing Only account there. It requires the same fields, but when you try to enable SMB for that account, you won’t get the “incorrect password” message anymore.

Hope this helps!

How to Change the Default Alert Time for Birthdays on iCal for Mac OSX Lion

When I switched over to iCal from Outlook, I was happy to find that they also had a birthday calendar. However the alert time was defaulting to 8:00 am and I like my reminders going off at 12:00 am. I tried looking for a setting to change it, but there wasn’t anything obvious inside preferences. The only option was to enable or disable “Show Birthdays calendar”.

After looking around a bit more, I noticed I had my Day starts at set to 8am, which felt too much to be a coincidence. I changed the starting time to Midnight, but my birthdays’ alert time didn’t get updated. I wondered if it would only apply to new birthdays that get added.

Then I tried disabling and re-enabling to show birthdays and that updated all my birthday reminders to have an alert time of 12am. Sweet!

TL;DR:

  1. Open iCal and go to preferences (⌘+,)
  2. Change “Day starts at:” to time you want your birthday alerts to go off
  3. Uncheck and recheck “Show Birthdays calendar”

iCal Preferences

All your birthday reminders should now have the new alert time. 🙂

Technically at this point, you might be able to change your day start time back and it wouldn’t affect your existing birthday alert times, but you’ll have to test that yourself.