Recently we had severals clients complaining about being unable to connect to their fileservers.

The following solution ONLY applies if this conditions are met:

• The user is unable to connect to all remote servers (it takes literally forever)
• Other users on the same machine are still able to connect (add a test user to be sure)
• All AFP and SMB servers are affected (maybe other protocols like WebDAV too)
• (optionally) If you select the server in the Finder sidebar you are not automatically logged in – but you are still able to authenticate using the “Connect as” button.

As you are still reading this post, you probably have a broken GlobalPreferences.plist configuration file.

Here’s how to fix it:

This problem can be easily fixed by opening the Terminal application and typing the following commands:

rm ./Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist
killall Finder

Explaination

This commands remove the GlobalPreferences configuration file and restart the Finder application. Several colleges reported that restarting Finder is not necessary but I still recommend it!

I have also found a blog post about a similar (most likely the same) issue: derflounder. The author investigated even further and found out, that the problem occurs while the Finder tries to connect to the already unavailable iDisk.