I have a 2017 MBP with MacOS High Sierra. When working from home, I typically connect to my work network via VPN and then I can mount various network drives (SMB).
When my Mac goes to sleep, I seem to automatically lose my active VPN connection and any mounted drives along with it. Strangely, the VPN connection still appears active (the connection timer continues in the menu bar), although any associated functionality is lost.
I can usually reconnect to the VPN without much trouble by disconnecting, then reconnecting as per usual. Unfortunately, I am unable to reconnect to any of the mounted drives. It seems as though my Mac falling asleep and interrupting the VPN connection places the mounted drives in some unusual intermediate state. If I attempt to reconnect to the mounted drives, I hear the system sound that indicates a successful connection and a finder window pops up, but the mounted drive is not visible/accessible.
Using Terminal, if I navigate to /Volumes, indeed I see the previously mounted network drives. However, if I attempt to cd into them, I get the following error:
cd: error retrieving current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: Socket is not connected
If I try to unmount the drives using "[sudo] diskutil unmount [force]", then I receive the message:
Unmount failed for /Volumes/DriveName
If I run "smbutil statshares -a", then I receive:
stat_share : SMBOpenServerWithMountPoint() failed for /Volumes/DriveName <DriveName>
stat_all_shares : stat_share() failed for /Volumes/DriveName
smbutil: unknown status -1073741772: No such file or directory
It seems the only way that I can reconnect to the drives is if I reboot my computer, but this is quite disruptive. Further, although I'm not certain, I believe this behaviour arose following my upgrade to High Sierra.
Any other suggestions for how to re-establish connection to these network drives?
Best Answer
We have a similar issue with our network drives at work. When that happens the following works:
Hold down the OPTION key. Right click on the finder icon. Left click on RELAUNCH.
Doing this seems to clear out the cache. Then the system realizes that while it was sleeping, it did in fact lose the connection to the drive, and lets you reconnect.