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Check out ADmitMac I have used their lower end DAVE product in the past and it did the job at the time. Apple's built-in solution relies on Samba, but its support for AD is a bit lacking.

As opposed to the Windows paging system? Has the author used a Windows OS lately? Swapping is a *bleeping* killer! Especially when you have more than enough memory not to swap. :-/

No OS performs well while swapping heavily, but OS X seems to swap too often. I'm at 4.65 GB of swap used right now on a system with 4 GB of RAM, 3.94 GB of it used. The sum of real memory allocated by all processes is less than 3 GB. In my experience, this is worse than Windows or Linux. It's not rare for applications or the entire system to respond slowly for seconds at a time.

Windows lets you disable or limit swap easily, and Linux gives you lots of control over how much swap you have and how it is used.

Macs support CIFS/SMB pretty darn well these days. I keep hoping that someone will come up with a better replacement, but CIFS/SMB will continue to work until that day comes.

I disagree. Compared to other non-Microsoft SMB/CIFS client implementations, the OS X SMB client is deficient.

• It does not support DFS, which basically amounts to having symlinks from one CIFS share to another (so a hierarchy of directories spread across many servers can be accessed via one namespace.) But Linux's cifs client driver can use it and Samba can host it. Closed-source DAVE supports DFS on OS X.
• By default, the OS X SMB client puts desktop folders and dotfiles on remote SMB shares.
• The smbfs driver in OS X is known to cause kernel panics.

It's not like Apple is a struggling company who can't afford to improve their SMB/CIFS client. It's not like the required protocols are so difficult to implement that no one can figure it out. It's not like Microsoft is suing anyone who dares implement certain features.

It's not like they're ignoring the SMB client altogether. In Leopard, they finally introduced SMB packet signing (which other non-Microsoft clients have supported for longer, including Samba's userspace smbclient.) And performance seems to have improved; in unscientific testing with no attempt to improve performance on the Samba server or client, I went from 45 mbytes/sec SMB performance in Tiger in any condition to performance very close to the maximum possible given the disks involved - about 70 mbytes/sec.

... and that's two without me even doing a search...

Long ago and far away, before there was OSX, when sysadmins needed to connect Macs to Windows shares, there was... DAVE. :)

Dave does WINS.

In the Mac community, will Thursby Software have anything to say? Their product DAVE, note that the name is also presented in uppercase, has been in the Mac arena for more than a decade.

There is a whole tranch of much more basic stuff that Tiger does not do such as DFS shares, no SMB signing etc. You can make Mac's work much better in a AD setup, but you have to shell more money out to a third party. ADmitMAC-vs-Tiger

To work in a corporate enviroment you need to be able to setup a Mac so that any random user on the system can walk upto the Mac and logon, have their network drive home folder automatically mapped to the computer, and a kerberos ticket stored and used with my web browser, when mapping windows shares, when doing LDAP queries etc. In addition my mail program needs to talk to the Exchange server in native protocols.

Maybe Lepoard will bring all these features, I would be very happy if it did. However I doubt that it will :-(

Can i from a mac conncet in an easy way to Windows (mean both "map up a drive"

smbfs (the SMB client file system that comes with OS X) and/or DAVE (third-party SMB client file system) are your friends here.

and thru "terminal server like software")?

Microsoft has Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac, Citrix has an ICA client for OS X that might work, and rdesktop is an open source client for the Remote Desktop Protocol which is available in Fink but that might require X11.

If i run iphoto and itunes can i have the actual songs/pictures on server running windows or linux?

iTunes stores the music in your home directory; my home directory at work is NFS-mounted, and that seems to work, so that might work with a Linux server if that's what your home directory is mounted from. I don't know whether it'd work over SMB to a Windows server.

I haven't tried iPhoto over NFS (or SMB), so I don't know whether that'd work.

At my job, I am one of two web developers. Besides us, there are the two owners and our systems admin. The owners want to become a viable commercial hosting service with secure storefronts, etc. Fine says me.

The problem lies in that one of the two owners (The husband) is a pig-headed idiot. Recently he asked us to implement a RAID solution for the webserver (notice the lack of an 's' at the end of webserver). Not a problem says sysadmin and myself, we come up with the plan, and present it to him, it involves RAID-5, blah, blah, blah, all the standard normal stuff that people do...He quickly scoffs at the idea, hands us a OLD P.O.S. with a couple 10'ish gig drives and says make it out of this and use RAID-1, and promises to order some large drives for the machine, so we can implement his RAID-1 solution but insists that nobody in their right mind would ever use RAID-5...

We of course are like what the hell? You want something that is enterprise level, and expect us to make it out of this P.O.S.???

We resign ourselves to doing the best we can with it and get a crummy webserver up and running with Slackware.. It is not the fastest machine, but it works for now. We currently have no RAID, becuase the large drives he said he would order have not been ordered for 2 months.

A couple weeks ago, we are talking about a file server for our internal software, etc. and he loves the idea..GREAT!!! So we spec out a modest system that will fulfill our needs and he says, oh I have a perfectly good fileserver at home that you guys can use to make it, and the COOL thing about it is that it runs on something similar to (but not) this. We research his little linux memory card thing and yes, it is cool, however it is not capable of doing what we need to have it do, and from what we can find out about it online it is not capable of performing one of the tasks without substantial work being done, the least of which is compiling and installing netatalk (which is no big deal) for some machines that cannot connect via Samba (MacOS 9 that would require DAVE that he is not willing to purchase).

So we add in the 2 120-Gig Drives to the PII/166 with 64M RAM that he gave us to make a file server from and find out that

• Floppy drive is bad
• 1 on-board IDE controller is shot
• CD-ROM Drive is broken

So we switch out to some other P.O.S. motherboard he has lying around and find that it has some popped caps, so it won't work either.

We eventually come up with a working P.O.S. motherboard, put some WRONG entries in the BIOS to make it recognize the 120Gig Drives and install a 4.xG drive to use as the system drive running samba and netatalk. All is looking well...

So we get FreeBSD installed today and are in the process of setting up the Xserver so he can have his GUI, since he doesn't know jack about the command line and then we are going to implement his RAID-1 that he loves so well on this machine also. We are stoked to say the least that after all that hassle we have a working system and FreeBSD sees the entirity of the 120G drives...

So he comes into work today and sees XWindows (twm) up and running and asks what we are doing, and we tell him, making the file server like we had talked about. He asks what it is running and we tell him FreeBSD 5.2.1 and we are finishing the config, then implementing the RAID and it will be ready to go. This is where it gets good.

He flies off the handle and says, did I tell you to use FreeBSD?? We are like...ummmmmmm...we talked about that memory card thing and explained to you why it wouldn't work and therefore have implemented a solution that fits our needs like we talked about. His response was "I told you

"Windows Users Fear Korgo Virus" screams the headline, reading not so much like news as just another WindowsXP sales pitch. Yes, it's true -- Windows users DO fear the Korgo virus, while the insignificant and ostracized Mac and Linux users of the world are left, yet again, fearing only the sheer and utter BOREDOM of not having any viruses or trojans to fix due to their curious choice of OS. In the area of viruses, trojans, and worms, Linux and the Mac really do stand out as being "second class citizens", trapped in a virus-free ghetto with no salvation in sight. The discrepancy is so obvious, the ultra-competitive Microsoft doesn't even feel the need to buy themselves an Official Gartner Group Research Study to prove that Windows is light-years ahead in this area. Even the most staunch Linux or Mac advocate is forced to admit it -- off the record, of course. Virus writers, known to be excellent coders who take pride in their tight, bugfree code, have overwhelmingly standardized on Microsoft Windows as their targeted system of choice in the deployment of their ongoing suite of virus applications.

And it doesn't look like the situation is going to get better any time soon.

One bearded Linux coder, who refused to be identified publicly, confessed "we just don't have the selection -- or quality -- of viruses on our platform that is available to Windows users free of charge. And it's tearing us up inside knowing that the battle is over, and Microsoft has clearly won." Similarly, a guy with an Apple logo shaved into the back of his head admitted the following once we turned off the cameras. "I don't mean to break ranks and insult our software selection," he whispered furtively, "but usually if we DO manage to get a virus that will even install on OS X, it's not that great, and we're left... disappointed, realizing that if we had simply stuck with the unwashed smelly masses, we too could be enjoying a daily barrage of free software delighting us by installing itself on our computers as a surprise gift. Instead, I'm stuck with the weak consolation prize of 40 Academy Awards for my work on Lord Of The Rings. But it's not the same. No amount of awards or million dollar paycheques can heal the feelings of neglect or massive abandonment issues this whole thing has given me."

"Is this the reason so many people choose Windows?", his innocent young son, Moof, asked me, looking like the kid off the Dave software box.

"What do you think, little one? Look at the Windows dominance in the virus field, then look at the marketshare of Windows. That ain't no coincidence, Moof. The other guys just can't keep up with the Microsoft Juggernaut. Microsoft is fighting hard to keep themselves Number One, just like the Titanic was the biggest and bestest ship, or the Hindenberg was the coolest and most flammable Zeppelin, or the dinosaurs were the toughest animals ever. How do you compete with that?"

=============

Yes, sitting here at my desk 16 hours later, WindowsXP Restore Disks in hand, I can't help but let a little smile shine across my face. Those poor fools, I think, using a non-Microsoft OS really does take away most of the joy of computing and replaces it with all that productivity and recreation crap. And where's the challenge in that?

Please insert Microsoft Windows XP Restore Disk 2

Ahhh, I sigh contentedly. It's gonna be a long night.

I like MT, and I use it for my blog, but I think their new pricing is just set too high. I'd be glad to pay a lower price, but at $70, it's a bit outside what I'm willing to pay. Give me a $35 version, with no installation support, and 10 blogs and 10 authors, and I'd be happy, it gives me the freedom to do what I want in the future, and still puts coins in SixApart's coffers.

There's nothing I hate more than overpriced software, especially from vendors who make things which are handy, but not critical. I'm not a hard-core Mac user, I just have my first PowerBook shipping to me now, so I've been shopping about for Mac software the last few days. Here's a case in point, the Netware client for Mac OS X. It's $159 per seat. Uh, that's more than I've ever paid for an Operating System, and you want me to pay that for a piece of client software? No thanks.

Howabout ADmitMac? $119 to join my Mac to an ActiveDirectory? No thanks, I'll live without.

Both of these would be handy pieces of software to have, but not at the prices they charge, I'll use FTP to connect to the Netware box before I'll shell out that kind of cash. I can't help but wonder if these companies wouldn't make more money by selling a downloadable copy for $29. That's low enough that a Mac user who can't get their boss to buy it for them will consider buying it out of their own pocket, just to make their lives easier. But once you're over the $50-$75 range, you're outside what most people want to spend on their box, just to enable a "handy" feature.

NetNewsWire Pro, on the other hand, is $39. For an App that I'd use all day, every day, that's quite a reasonable price, and as soon as my new PowerBook arrives, Brent will see some of my cash. But, if that price were doubled, I probably wouldn't be paying for it, and I'd either stick to a free lite version, or use a competing product of lesser quality.

And don't get me wrong, I know that software authors need to make a living, but I wonder if they're being counter-productive in terms of what they make. You make a lot more money selling 10,000 copies of a $29 product than you do selling 1000 copies of a $100 product. And yes, I know that support costs something, so make it an option to purchase it without on-line support, if necessary. I generally don't find support, even from our large vendors to be all that helpful anyhow, just give me an online knowledgebase, and I'll fix it myself. :)

Also, the dreaded pinwheel of death when a server disconnects before you eject the mount from your desktop. Panther handles this much better than previous revs, but I still find myself force-quitting the Finder more often than I should (aka never).

What you're asking for is a SAN.

I just installed a Network Appliance FAS250 in my server room. It speaks CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI.

By the way, you're wrong... Oracle will run perfectly using CIFS shares (I'm running it now, and have been for the past few months), and NetApp has plenty of documents in their tech library showing all the different ways to use attached storage with Oracle and many other pieces of software.

With respect to speed, it really depends on the network infrastructure. I've got a Cisco GigE switch attaching 6 machines directly to a GigE port on the NetApp Filer. It is literally twice as fast than the directly attached RAID 5 (caching, etc.) arrays that it replaced.

I think that Microsoft Exchange can be installed to a CIFS share, but if not, you should look at iSCSI. My company uses Lotus Notes 4.6.7 (sweet, merciful Christ, please put me out of my misery), and it works great from a CIFS share on the NetApp.

Microsoft has a free iSCSI Initiator for Windows that will mount an iSCSI device just like any other SCSI drive in Windows. You can find several iSCSI targets for linux here.

I have about 50 Mac's on our network (graphics department) that needed to talk with the new filer. Instead of installing a klugy piece of software to make the OS9 Macs talk to the SAN at $150/seat, I installed a linux box using samba to talk to the SAN through CIFS and netatalk (AppleTalk for linux) to re-share out the samba mounts. Becides some quirks (Mac's don't see the linux gateway in the AFP browse list, but can connect directly through IP), it works rather well.

Look at iSCSI, it does exactly what you're looking for.

Yeah? How about browsing a routed Windows network with WINS? What about printing to a Sharp AR-810 printer/copier? These are things I found I could not do with a Mac.


Have you looked into running DAVE?

I just set up a network (My Mac with my family's two PCs), and I decided to forgo all that and just install DAVE; easy Windows networking. However, other people probably just want it outa the box.

I have a Windows box with an OK printer. I'd like to be able to print to it from the mac using the normal printer-sharing thing that Windows does. (If it's not clear already, I don't print very often, and am clearly not an expert in the configuration of printing)

As far as I can tell, this isn't possible using Mac OS 10.1; is it possible using Jagwire?

Also, is there any other way to get printing from my mac to my windows box working? The easier the better, of course. I have seen that there's a program called "Dave", but it's too expensive a solution for my casual printing needs, and the box is a little, well, too touchy-feely old-school "Mac" for me. :)

Apple is trying to kill off native AppleTalk and just using AFP via TCP/IP.

AFAIK, Jaguar supports mounting Windows shares out of the box. For Mac OS 9.x, you can get DAVE from Thursby.

There is also a means to get OS X machines to speak old-school AppleTalk. Dunno if it'll work in your situation, but you enable it by using the NetInfo Manager application. Go to /config/AppleFileServer, and modify the attribute "use_appletalk" from 0 to 1. A full description of the procedure can be found at the bottom of this page, but what I wrote above is enough to get an OS X Mac speaking old AppleTalk.

~Philly

(well the macs can't, but I'm working on setting up some sort of mac compatible solution alongside samba)

If you are using MacOS 9, I really highly recommend you pick up a copy of DAVE and bag setting up Netatalk. DAVE works marvellously for me (and if you ever need to burn a CD especially for your Mac on a *nix box, mkisofs understands the files DAVE uses to keep the extra metadata and resource forks that MacOS's HFS has -- quite convenient for burning CDs full of Mac software), does not have a problem with long file names, and I highly recommend it.

If you are an OS X user, either pick up a copy of Sharity if you are stuck with Mac OS X 10.0.4, or just use MacOS X 10.1 which has an included SMB client. MacOS X can also mount NFS exports, so there is always that alternative as well. I haven't had tremendous luck with Sharity, though.

I concur.

The iBook is the perfect balance of size and features, with a full complement of ports. I have found it to be the ideal consultant laptop. It fits in my backpack, inside a great padded case, along with my CD case and tool kit. The battery life is sufficient that I can usually save additional weight by leaving the AC adapter at home.

The iBook's ethernet port auto-senses not only speed, but also whether it is connected to a hub or another computer-- no more carrying around a straight-thru and a crossover cable. Throw in DAVE, and there's practically no network I can't hop onto in a matter of minutes to work at a client site. For good measure, I installed Virtual PC and put Windows 2000 on it. The iBook handles it pretty well with sufficient RAM (I have 320MB).

I love it when my clients suppress a snicker when I pull out my iBook, and then I proceed to astonish them by retrieving data from files that their precious Windows machines choke on, thus saving their asses.

~Philly

Samba FS is only supported on Linux.

Define "supported". FreeBSD now has Boris Popov's smbfs in the CVS tree, for example; it looks as if it's been MFC'ed, so it's at least in -stable.

There's also an SMB client and server available for MacOS Classic from Thursby Software.

I guess getting smbfs to work on other unixs and mac os is pretty hard, because it's been this way for a while.

No, it hasn't. Heck, I think that one of the earliest SMB clients servers was an SMB implementation for Xenix (yeah, the version of UNIX that those people did, a long time ago) from Intel, called OpenNet or something such as that, and, as already indicated, there already exist SMB file system clients (i.e., transparent clients, not FTP-like clients) for FreeBSD and MacOS classic.

It has to work on Windows...

Apple has announced it has no plans to support a JVM later than 1.1.8 on the classic Mac OS so you can't use all those great collection classes in Java 1.2 and be cross platform! (See Apple's Java Developer page and scroll down to where it says "Mac OS Classic Java".)

Use a cross-platform application framework. That way you can program on Linux, Mac, BeOS, Windows or maybe even QNX and deliver for all those schoolkids running Windows ME on their parents' PC.

One such framework, for C++, is ZooLib. There are many others, as you can see from The GUI Toolkit, Framework Page.

Read about why it's important to write cross-platform code.

I'm most familiar with ZooLib, because I've been working with it on the products I write for my clients, and I helped ZooLib author Andy Green prepare it for open source release late last year under the MIT License.

ZooLib offers all of the following implemented as C++ classes:

• Multithreading, with cross-platform C++ thread classes and various kinds of locks (simple mutexes, reader/writer locks) - multithreading is important for something like a servent. For systems like the Mac OS that don't have preemptive threads it has a handrolled thread scheduler.
• GUI, with a uniquely flexible layout method. The widgets are rendered by platform appropriate renderers, and you can make custom widgets. There's a renderer that will call through to the Appearance Manager on the Mac OS, if it's running.
• platform-independent TCP networking, it's implemented in terms of sockets on Linux, WinSock on Windows, sockets on BeOS and MacTCP on Mac OS. I think Open Transport may be working too on the Mac, I'm not sure - but on all platforms you use the same C++ classes for your networking with no platform-specific client code needed.
• Thread-safe reference counted smart pointers, for quick, efficient memory management that's free of leaks.
• Extensive debugging support - assertions in core components and a debugging memory manager, handy macros for assertions and the like
• Single-file database format with C++ interface. Create ZDatabase objects with ZTables in them. Much zippier than SQL and more pleasing to the object-oriented soul.
• File objects - you instantiate a ZFile object from a ZFileRef object, then use its Open, Close, Read and Write methods
• Platform-specific file open and save dialogs with an API that's consistent with the rest of ZooLib. Filter by filetype on the Mac or filename three letter extension on windows. While ZooLib is cross-platform, it breaks out into platform specific code in cases like this where it's appropriate, in a way that's considered entirely sacreligious by the Java community.
• Streams that can be chained to provide filtering, somewhat like the iostreams classes in the C++ standard library but more appropriate for use with binary data. This is how you typically read or write to a file or network connection.
• Handy preprocessor macros to deal with platform specific code or selecting options like debug builds.
• Offscreen graphics buffers that may be manipulated directly via pointers or accessed in a manner that is transparent to the bit depth via GetPixel and SetPixel calls. All platforms have the same API that provide a wrapper around platform bitmap buffers. I believe there's a purely homegrown in-memory implementation, plus platform implementations bounds to the native GUI layer like GWorlds on the Mac OS.

ZooLib 0.81 is known to build with MetroWerks CodeWarrior on Windows and Mac OS, gcc on Linux, and gcc on BeOS for Pentium.

If you use CodeWarrior you can cross-compile and cross-debug; check out Thursby Software for some filesharing solutions that work well for this. (Tip - on Windows, select the "MacBinarize" post-linker in the target linker prefs when building a Mac target - you also need to derez all your resource files and include them as Rez text source).

While it should ultimately work, there are known build problems with BSD, CodeWarrior for BeOS PowerPC and Visual C++ on Windows. These are all being worked on and full support for all these platforms is expected before long.

Other cross-platform frameworks I'd like to note are:

• The Adaptive Communications Environment for cross-platform networking
• GTK - yes, that's right, GTK! but you must forgo using XLib calls and POSIX calls that are not in the ANSI C Standard Library
• The Netscape Portable Runtime for the non-GUI aspects of cross-platform development
• The Mozilla XPToolkit for cross-platform GUI
• Mozilla Netlib for network and file stream access
• Mozilla XPInstall for cross-platform installation, packaging and updating.
• Also check out AbiWord, a great cross-platform WYSIWYG word processor that's open source, with an open file format. As far as I know the only product coded in AbiWord's XP framework is AbiWord itself, but it's worth looking into for another look at how people architect these things.

People often mistake these problems for valid arguments that one should not do cross-platform development, or perhaps not render your own widgets when doing so but depend on platform specific ones (like AWT vs. Swing), but I think the lightweight, well architected, efficient and easy to use ZooLib answers those arguments very eloquently.

Help me teach the Free Software community to write quality code.

Mike

I wonder how long it'll take to turn samba admin into a 'control panel', and be done with Dave.

Be done with DAVE (if by that you mean, as I suspect is the case, Thursby Software's DAVE) for people using it as an SMB server, that is. For people using DAVE as a client, you'd need to have something like the smbfs for FreeBSD ported to MacOS X. (I don't know how hard it is to port a FreeBSD file system to the MacOS X kernel; I'm assuming here that it'd be easier than porting the Linux smbfs.)

Dave ( http://www.thursby.com/ ) for Mac.