Viewing dollar sign shares over Samba on OS X? I love Finder's built-in "connect to server" functionality. It's great, if not a bit hidden! (Those of you that don't know about it, right-click the Finder icon in your dock and hit Connect to Server) So I use it to connect to Windows shares on several computers; I type in the address of smb://computername and hit Connect, and it prompts me which shares I want to mount, and mounts them. It Just Works, as is typical of Mac.

However, I know that on Linux, you can browse a server and see the shares that end in a $; these, of course, are supposed to be hidden (e.g. in Windows, you wouldn't ever see them) but Linux breaks through the illusion of security (or at least privacy) and shows them all.

Unfortunately, using the Connect to Server method above, I am not able to see any dollar sign shares of my server. I know this particular server has about 20 shares ending in $, and yet I only see these few public shares.



Is there a way to configure the OS X version of Samba to show these "hidden" shares?
I'm not aware of a way to make them show in the list, but you could just type smb://servername/sharename$ in that box, if you know the name of the share.

In that initial Connect to Server window, you can also click the + icon to bookmark it in the list below the text field. That way, you don't have to type it every time.

Alternately, if you have a bunch of them that you mount together, you can create an Automator script that will mount them for you, provided you know the share name for each. I wrote about that option in an answer to another question back in October.