“AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: connect on failed” causing Finder crash

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The Problem

“AFP_VFS afpfs_DoReconnect: connect on failed”: I’ve been plagued by this error for some weeks, which relates to waking my Macbook Air from sleep after being connected to my synology NAS at work. The console is replete with hundreds of these messages as it tries to re-connect to the server that is no longer available and there does not seem to be a routine that allows it detect that the server is no longer available and stop attempting to reconnect. As a result the finder simply ceases to be responsive and if you force quit it, it does not spawn properly again.

How to fix it

After getting frustrated with having to log out and log back in again to regain a responsive finder, I googled and failed to find a solution so I turned to the Activity Monitor where I noticed substantial activity from the “soagent” and found that if I force quit that – don’t worry it’ll respawn unharmed – then I got my finder back. Not the most elegant of solutions but quicky, dirty and more importantly successful. I hope the bug will get corrected in a future release of OS X (at the time of writing I’m using 10.10.3) but in the meantime this works.

Update

Okay that solution didn’t work frequently enough but this new one, thanks to Krysole at superuser.com does indeed work. I generally check which smb mounts are malfunctioning from the console and then go to terminal and use the following command:

sudo umount -f /Volumes/”volume name”

And bye, bye problem!

PPS

This problem has now been fixed by El Capitan… Woot!

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