I have a late 2009 iMac running 10.6. Recently tried connecting an Iomega home net storage drive via ethernet. Drive is fat32 and has smb activated. created a user on my mac with same name as drive, turned on smb file sharing, allowed file sharing through the firewall, and shared directories being accessed. I can mount the drive reliably and copy from it but get seemingly random but frequent error messages "'finder cannot read or write files. error code -36."

Any ideas? I may give up and connect drive via usb but would like to have net storage avail for visiting mac laptops.

Yep, this is a common problem.

It will occur when you attempt to copy files onto a FAT or FAT32 volume whose names violate the FAT/MS-DOS file naming rules.

For example, files whose names contain spaces, certain punctuation marks (such as slashes, backslashes, question marks, or asterisks), or accented/non-English characters will trigger this error.

the maddening part of it is it doesn't tell you what the name of the offending file is (nor where it's at), and it aborts the copy.

You can look at the copy tree on the destination to tell where it got to, and then look at the original and see what was "next in line" that caused the problems.

File name length can also be an issue, in addition to unacceptable characters.

These are safe:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890_@$.

There are others that are safe also but this was the DOS list, not the windows list.

I don't seem to have written down what the length is.

Thanks all,

hadn't realized spaces in file names were a violation of fat 32.

I'm assuming fat 32 is 256 character compliant.

any utilities known for auto renaming in compliant fashion?

There are probably lots of options, but the one I like--clean interface, easy to use, been around a long time (i.e., updated regularly)--is A Better Finder Rename. It is well worth the $19.95