[VonMagnum]

There's a simple solution to this problem (actually there's more than one). I was using SMBUp to install Samba3 and that works fine for the most part, although XBMC does tend to time-out a lot before my media drive can wake from sleep, but clicking on the file again then works. This has the down-side of replacing the more efficient (as far as I know anyway) SMB2 that Apple has licensed from Microsoft. Sadly, XBMC (Eden, at least, that I have on my Gen1 AppleTVs still due to not wanting to boot off memory sticks or lose my Apple GUI) does not like Apple's SMB2 at all so if you want SMB in XBMC you have to choose. And as mentioned, AFP support in XBMC is buggy as hell and will lock your player system up sooner or later in my experience.

A BETTER solution is to switch to NFS on the OSX server machine. Not only does it perform better than Samba3 (e.g. I NEVER get a time-out error while my hard drive wakes up anymore), but I am then free to go back to using SMB2 to talk to other newer Macs and Windows machines. Unfortunately, NFS doesn't have a graphical interface to set it up in OSX and sadly also NFS Manager (3rd party app) also failed to get it working (I think I have since read I had to disable some privileged port option, but even the website says it has issues with Mavericks NFS, plus it whines about DNS servers which is off-putting since following their instructions for adding my router to the DNS list did nothing to eliminate the error.

In any case, it turns out NFS is actually very easy to set up manually.

EDIT: I did post 3 easy steps to make it work as quickly and as simple as possible, but I've been informed by an XBMC developer that he wants people pointed to the Wiki instead. I suggest you read it carefully: http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=NFS#NFS_sharing_from_OS_X