Using BBEdit with SMB Shares

25 January 2004

On the basis of high recommendation, an outstanding reputation and an impressive feature list, I’ve been trialling BBEdit on my Mac. My primary needs, as noted before are PHP, XHTML, CSS, and XML - nothing out of the ordinary there for your average professional web developer, and handled capably thus far with HomeSite on Windows. Again, not out of the ordinary, I work with a dedicated development server both here at home and at work, and by running SMB on my development servers I can treat them just like a local file system and work directly from those shares when I need to.

Except in BBEdit, that is. I’ve got this problem whereby I can’t create or modify files with BBEdit if the files are being accessed across an SMB share (i.e. browsed for across the network from my file manager – Finder in this case). My first conclusion was that I had the permissions incorrectly set on the server – even though this had been working find from Windows authenticating as the same user. I figured that maybe Windows had been slack with how it was handling the finer points of unix-style permissions at letting me get away with a bad config – although as I thought about it I realized that this doesn’t make sense, as it’s the server enforcing the security, not the client.

So I checked all the permissions on the server – everything seemed good. I checked that I could still use the share as normal from my Windows box – I could. So I fired up SimpleText on my Mac – and I could modify files from there too. It looks like this problem lies somewhere with BBEdit, or at the very least the default configuration it ships with. So I emailed BareBones Software and asked if they knew what was happening. Evidentially, they don’t have a clue. Whilst quick and responsive (and always polite) with initial troubleshooting suggestions, as soon as it became apparent that the problem wasn’t anything straightforward they went cold on me. So I’m kinda in a jam. I don’t want to pay out for BBEdit when I can’t use it to do this simple thing – however, I suspect I won’t get any further with BareBones until I’m a paying customer (which is perfectly understandable).

Anyone got any suggestions why this isn’t working? In the mean time I’ve been using skEdit which is coping with the same situation just fine. It’s actually quite a nice editor too.

About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Caburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

Comments

§ Jesse: I am still on BBedit 6.5 and was just thinking about 7.1 (tried 7.0)... with 6.5 I have not had a problem with SMB mounts but they are on a Sun Unix server. What windows version are you mounting the SMB shares from?
§ Drew: Thanks Jesse. The shares themselves reside on a Debian Linux box. The Windows box I use is running XP Pro.

Maybe they might have an old trial of 6.5 that I could try to see if it’s something they’ve broken recently. That said, I’ve not ruled out the fact that it could be a configuration issue with the server, but it’s odd that it’s only affecting BBEdit if that’s the case.
§ Jesse: I tried a SMB mount from an OS X machine with the 7.1 trail and no problems. I will give it a try tomorrow at work with a linux machine hosting the SMB, my connection from home to work is too slow to try anything. I really need to change my ISP...
§ Eric Hancock: HI Drew -

I’m guessing that it lies somewhere in BBEdit’s Carbon underpinnings.

If you haven’t already, try the very latest version, and if that doesn’t work, do contact Bare Bones. They have been very responsive in the past.

I don’t have any SMB here, but I can test the latest version when I’m back in the office on Monday.
§ Kyle Adams: Drew,

I’ve used both skEdit and BBEdit, and my impressions are that skEdit still has many rough edges (for example, line numbers frequently do not display properly) and BBEdit’s getting a bit behind the curve (feels a bit old-skewl to me, and I’ve been using it since System 7 days).

Anyhow, apart from that short aside, I’m wondering if you’ve given thought to using WebDAV instead of SMB for sharing your files. It would fill in the same functionality (with potential pluses like versioning facilities) and it would be one less dependency on a Microsoft-controlled technology. I believe the binary versions of Apache 2 have mod_dav included, so setup shouldn’t be too painful (I’m running Apache 2/mod_dav/subversion for my web files).
§ Drew: Jesse - thanks for trying that out for me. That’s truly beyond the call of duty and is very much appreciated.

Eric - you mention Carbon presumably because the other apps I’ve been testing with (TextEdit and skEdit) are Cocoa based? Is there another Carbon based editor I could test with to compare results?

Kyle - to be honest, I hadn’t thought of WebDav. I pretty much need to coexist with Windows boxes both at home (although frequently less so) and particularly at work, so I’ll be using SMB in some capacity come-what-may. I’m looking at starting to use CVS more at work (team development), so that’s taking care of the version control. It also takes care of the SMB problem in that context. Any recommendations for a good smooth-around-the-edges nu skool cocoa-based editor?
§ Eric Hancock: Yes, I was guessing that there was a problem with the Carbon app accessing SMB shares; the others were Cocoa.

Just a guess, though.
§ Jesse: Ugg.. bit slow into the office today. There is a little blowing snow and 15cm on its way (on top of the 40cm or so on the ground). Great for snowboarding ;)

Ya I tried 7.1 on a smb connection to a windows 2000 server (no linux smb at the moment) and no problems. So it could be a permissions thing, or a Debian thing as one of our Linux admins here suggested. I guess he has had strange things happen with Debian and SMB.
§ Matt: I discovered skEdit this weekend. I finally got round to upgrading to panther and discovered that jEdit, my former tool of choice, no longer worked. After hunting around for a few hours I ended up with skEdit which is so far so good.
§ Kyle Adams: Still looking for a nu skool, easy on the eyes, nothing but the good stuff editor. I do have high hopes skEdit will turn into that after a few releases.

As to CVS, I’d also recommend you take a look at Subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org)—not that I have anything against CVS (I’m the CVS admin at work), but Subversion is CVS without the big annoyances (better handling of binary files, versioning of directory structures, etc.)

In fact, Subversion was what got me playing around with WebDAV, since Subversion is built on top of WebDAV (via Apache).
§ Jim: I’ve run into similarly perplexing “permission” problems using bbedit on 10.2.x to edit files on a samba mount that was running under debian. We never figured out what the problem was, but happily the upgrade to 10.3 solved the problem.

All in the <head>