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Samba Under OS X?

Posted by Cliff on from the ubiquitous-smb-service-for-all-OSes dept.

iriefrank asks: "Thursby Software announced it will demonstrate a Mac OS X version of its popular DAVE filesharing software. It will include peer-to-peer file and print sharing between PCs and Macs, but now that Mac OS has UNIX underpinnings (and uses BSD networking), could one easily port SAMBA to OS X?" Just to be fair, could someone familiar with DAVE let us know if it offers anything more than what one can get with SAMBA?

3 of 8 comments (clear)

  1. Samba is being used on OS X by Crewd · · Score: 4

    Check out these two urls that explain how to use samba on OS X :

    http://osx.macnn.com/features/installsamba.phtml
    http://www2.kenyon.edu/people/shankb/samba/

  2. Dave != Samba. And Samba on OS X is okay, but... by hatless · · Score: 2
    DAVE is primarily an SMB client for the Mac. It performs the function of the Linux/BSD smbmount utility, allowing a Mac to attach to SMB fileshares as transparent volumes. It also includes a Network Neighborhood-like network/share browser, and allows users to connect to SMB printers through the Chooser. It can do filesharing in the other direction, but that's not its main job, and you'll seldom see the classic MacOS version running a serious SMB fileserver. Maybe performance will be better in the OS X port.

    Samba is primarily an SMB fileserver, and mostly overlaps with Dave in its ability to act as an SMB print client, and on a few OSes can also act as an SMB file-access client via smbmount.

    OS X can run Appleshare IP Server, a package that can also act as an SMB fileserver, and has nice admin tools for doing so.

    Beyond open-source religious issues and the nominal cost of Appleshare IP Server, the main reasons to run Samba on OS X are as follows:
    1. Authentication against NT domains rather than against the MacOS users/groups or whatever the given Mac is authenticating against
    2. SMB print serving
    3. SMB print client, for those extremely rare cases when you have a network printer that does speak SMB but doesn't speak Appletalk or LPD, or you're doing job auditing through an SMB print queue
    4. WIndows PDC functionality
  3. DAVE is not recommended by jbridges · · Score: 3

    Want to copy a couple files across the network? DAVE might be fine.

    Want to actually run software across the network? Or GASP, actually access files, maybe do cross development with CodeWarrior?

    Forget DAVE! Dave is not industrial strength, Dave is flakey, Dave is not ready for prime time.

    (by the way, ever try and search Usenet or the web for info on a product with a name so freakin common that you can't find anything? Imagine if Linux was called "John", BLEAH!)

    I pounded on the Apple reps at a OSX developer conference in June, they knew nothing about Samba, still towing the "we support cross platform networking" when that basicly means TCP/IP and oh by the way, if you want to share files, use AppleTalk. Some other developers stood up and said people had gotten Samba to run on OSX. But that's not exactly nice and friendly, and built into the pretty little interface, is it?

    The saving grace at this point is the pretty decent Appletalk support over TCP/IP built into Win2000. Without it, cross platform file access from a Mac to Windows would be pretty grim...