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Using Macs In The Work Place
Kelly McNeill writes "It's been said that bringing a Macintosh into a corporate environment dominated by Windows-based PCs is not an easy task. Once you cut through the corporate red tape, then get through ignorant IT staff you still have to connect and gain access to all the services on the network. osViews editorial contributor Kevin Ledgister took on this challenge and passed the test with flying colors."
I am an IT architect who has for the last 10 years simply plugged my Mac into any LAN where I work. TCPDump allows me to sniff what network range is in use, then ping for an unused IP, and away I go. When support staff walk around, just unplug and look innocent. 99% of corporate security is LAX and allows anything. I keep virtual PC for Project and Visio. Afer staff see me, there is a flood of portables that then appear when the users figure out that can use their nice sleek powerful home portable as opposed to rigid old slow corporate junk. And yes, now with OS X, I can connect easier to Windoze servers. With OS 9 I used DAVE.
As the system administrator for the project, that best part is I can roll back any changes. Say, if apple were to release a bad update, I could just remove the overload and everyone would be back at say, a working 10.2.7.
Let's see you do that with windows.
netatalk? How quaint :)
With Mac OS X, there's no need to go running netatalk; OS X will speak NFS just fine -- or, if you don't want to go that far, there's always FTP and/or SSH. If you're in a mixed environment, OS X's SMB support is good enough that there's little point in running netatalk in addition to SAMBA.
If you want to see stuff run really slick, install CUPS on your UNIX boxes. Watch all your systems, Mac and traditional UNIX, use SLP autodiscovery to self-configure printers.
A big part of allowing Macs to be easy additions to one's IT environment is simply using actual standards, instead of "Microsoft standards." Generally, Mac OS X does an excellent job of supporting standards that have RFCs associated with 'em. For instance, OS X plays great in an LDAP directory environment. If you're using Active Directory, OS X can still be made to work -- but as with any non-Microsoft OS trying to use a proprietary Microsoft "standard," it's going to be awkward.
It's not that Macs are hard to put into an IT environment. It's that a lot of IT environments have been designed using protocols and tools that only work well under Microsoft OSes, because Microsoft designed them that way. If Ford came out with a car that only worked with a special Shell gasoline, you shouldn't blame Mobil for not being able to fill your tank.
> I even plugged my laptop into a router outside of our
...
> network and it worked fine. But inside our corporate
> network, I would only get a 169... number which meant
> that I wasn't getting one from the network server.
ifconfig --renew
That will solve his problem lickety-split
> I still couldn't browse network shares and I tried joining
> our Active Directory domain using Admit Mac but it
> wouldn't let me join.
> don't know when this happened but I could now browse
> through the servers and mount them on my desktop. I
> ran back to IT again asking if they had turned on Services
> for Mac, which I had asked them to consider.
What is he *doing* with ADmitMAC? It's simple, click on Finder, select "Go" from the menu and select "Connect to Server". No need for "Services for Mac" or any other BS.
> Then I downloaded Outlook 2001 for OS 8-9 and it
> connected instantly and ran much smoother than either
> of the two methods I used previously. The only downside
> is that Outlook for Mac does not render HTML email
> properly. But that is a small price to pay.
The name for the OS X version of Outlook is ENTOURAGE. He'd know this if he actually bothered to get Office X (which was probably pre-installed on his machine as a 30 day trial anyway).
Did he even TRY to search the net for tutorials on how to get his machine hooked up to a windows network? It *really* is NOT hard. I'm probably being a bit hard on the guy, but COME ON. It's a completely new OS and he's treating it like the 10 years out of date OS 9.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade