I finally decided to upgrade my Mac Mini to OS X 10.7 the other day and am regretting it, mainly due to the fact that Apple has removed the opensource SAMBA (Windows file sharing) implementation (due to changes in the licensing) and have implemented their own half-arsed version of it which just flat out doesn't seem to work for me.

I've got a large NTFS drive (I've got Paragon's NTFS driver which works marvellously) attached to it as a media share as well as a largish exFAT drive (both need to be PC readable).

The other machine I have simply does not see the NTFS share at all via AFP (logged in either as guest or the local ser), and if I switch to SAMBA\CIFS then they see it but trying to access it results in "unable to find original item"
 
The exFAT drive is shared just fine via AFP, but same issue with SAMBA.

Sharing permissions are setup the same on both shares. I _can_ however access my user-folder via AFP on the macbook, not very useful though.
 
I see there's some fairly complex solutions for re-installing the original GPL SAMBA  implementation via XCode and then configuring it via shellscript - but is there any other way to get Windows PCs.

Other devices I've tried using are a Win7 PC, WinXP and Win7 VMs running on the Mac Mini, plus a Macbook and a couple of Android devices.

Has anyone come up with a relatively painless way of getting filesharing working as well as it did in 10.6.7 under 10.7.3? Particularly windows-friendly sharing.


The main drive in the mac mini has been upgraded to a 40GB SSD drive, so any space I can save by not having to install development environments would be nice.