Spontaneous duplicate naming for network volumes?

I've just spent hours fixing a problem that appears to have been caused due to OS X spontaneously changing volume names for network volumes.

I am running OS X 10.6.1.

I have an SMB mapped network share that houses all of the media files I use on the Mac. For example, all of my music files are on this SMB share, and in the Library.XML file I can see that the Mac refers to all of them as having the location of;

file://localhost/Volumes/Music

And in the terminal I can see this volume mapped as;

//Jason@gizmo:139/Music

(gizmo is the name of the server).

The problem is that in a recent iTunes library copy operation which involved exporting of playlists, etc, I observed that I was missing a LARGE amount of music.

Investigation showed that I had a large number of tracks that had the file path of

file://localhost/Volumes/Music-1

Sure enough when I did a df command on the terminal I could see that for all of my network shares I had mappings for both the original volume name as well as a 2nd mapping that referred to that same volume with "-1" tacked onto the end of it.

A reboot got rid of the duplicate volumes but leaves me with the question of "how the hell does this happen"?

I would hate to copy a bunch of new music into iTunes from this network share only to discover that the same thing has happened again.

Interesting.

The strange thing is that I don't recall any kind of reboot or interrupt happening as per the Apple explanation for what causes the problem.

To make matters worse I know I had done a reboot since the tracks with the bad volume were added and yet when I checked it was showing the bad volume.

A reboot has cleared it but I have concerns that it will come back after a wake from sleep event, etc.

Well, I seem to be very good at duplicating it because I was just able to duplicate it again.

I had rebooted my machine to clear this up and checked it periodically throughout the day and made sure that even after wake up from sleep, etc, the correct volume names were showing up.

Then I connected my VPN client and disconnected it. I then ran an application that reads iTunes XML files and exports the playlists in m3u format (yes kids, iTunes Exporter now supports OS X) and noticed that when I selected my "Music" share it showed up in the dialogue box of the application as "Music-1".

A check of volumes confirms that the nasty volume is back.

//Jason@gizmo:139/Music 2888310280 0 5057671696 0% /Volumes/Music

//Jason@gizmo/Music 2888310280 0 5057671696 0% /Volumes/Music-1
Jason-Pages-iMac:~ Jason$

I suppose it is possible that the VPN client is somehow doing this, but it still smells like a problem on Apple's end.

Actually it appears as though this application is capable of stimulating the bug if you point the output file to a network SMB share as I've been able to recreate it three times now.

I suspect a problem with Adobe Air is somehow fooling OS X and getting it to mount/map a phantom volume with the same path as the "real" one.

This is what I posted on the developers blog;

Okay, actually I've now confirmed that Adobe Air (or somehow your app but I doubt it) is triggering this Apple problem;

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2474

After a fresh reboot my volumes all look good;
//Jason@gizmo:139/Music 2888310280 0 5057646504 0% /Volumes/Music

Then as soon as I select my /Music/Playlists network share folder as the output destination it shows up in the dialogue box as "Music-1" in the path.

A check of the filesystem shows this;

//Jason@gizmo:139/Music 2888310280 0 5057646504 0% /Volumes/Music
//Jason@gizmo/Music 2888310280 0 5057646504 0% /Volumes/Music-1

I now have a ghost volume "Music-1", which by the way will wreak havoc with the iTunes database if you at this point start adding new music, etc, since it will show up in the iTunes db as being in the "Music-1" path.

Anyways, this is probably an Adobe Air and Apple problem but I thought you should be aware of it.

I have apparently resolved the problem, see the above Apple support thread for all the greasy details.