Network Programming in .NET

There is probably a million fixes for this online, but perhaps this may be one of the more obscure fixes. I got a new network hard drive, from Emtec, which would connect to every other device in the house (mac, old PC, Android TV, Apple TV) but not my main Windows PC. So why?

Not a very helpful error message, when I simply tried to connect to \\emtec, since I just got a “Unspecified error”. I could ping the device, and even the path \\emtec\data worked, but this didn’t grant write access.

So when I tried \\emtec\WiFiDisk1_Volume1 it told me that it was using a deprecated version of SMB, SMB 1 instead of SMB 2. Thankfully, this was at last a meaningful error message, so I could use “Add Windows Features” to add SMB 1 support to my PC, and it finally worked.

A lesson for developers … give descriptive error messages. Something may seem super-obvious to you, but if you just swallow the error, then you give your end users nothing to go on.

I can’t say if the problem is with Emtec, using an old version of SMB, or with Windows for not describing the error properly. But the easier fix would be at the Windows level.