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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."
Contributor: Kevin Ledgister
:: Open Content
"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."
For the last two years, I have had to use a Dell laptop at work running Windows 2000 in a mid size company with 300-400 employees. After suffering through several complete rebuilds, blue screens, as well as dealing with patches and security upgrades, I decided that enough is enough.
I ordered the brand new 12" PowerBook on my own and decided that this would be my daily computer to replace my Dell. Quite a few people were curious at this silver beauty compared to the generic charcoal laptops on their desks -- and some even said that their next system will be a Mac too.
As I've come to learn however, integrating a Mac into an all PC world is not without its challenges.
IT Ignorance
The first challenge was dealing with an IT department that was completely ignorant of the Mac platform. Although they were helpful and curious about the Macintosh, they really couldn't offer much help so I was on my own. At my place of employment, they use Active Directory and after doing a lot of reading on the subject, I realized that it was not going to be the easiest transition.
When my PowerBook arrived, I immediately plugged a network cable into it, but for some reason, it was not being assigned an IP address. I checked all the settings and they were correct. 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.
I downloaded ADmitMac from Thursby hoping that it would help connect me to the laptop but that required a valid IP address as well so I still was left out in the cold.
Frustrated, I connected my PowerBook using the phone line by my desk and dialed into our corporate network, which was slow, but at least I could browse the Internet and check email to our Exchange servers running Outlook for Windows under Citrix. No one was able to help explain why this was happening. Not Apple, nor our IT department.
Ups and Downs
After two days of this, I got disconnected again from the phone connection but iChat stayed active and I was still getting messages! I opened up the System Preferences and suddenly I had an assigned IP address. I ran to the IT department asking for an explanation for what they did, to which they replied, "Nothing."
So now I had high-speed access to the network but not all was solved.
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. So, I fired up Virtual PC, installed Windows 2000, and asked an IT person to join Win2k to the domain and it worked. I was also able to browse the network using a Citrix client but this was still hokey.
Little did I know that ADmit Mac didn't work because I didn't have rights to join a computer to the domain. But a week after I got all this up and running, I accidentally chose the Connect to Server function when I meant to go to a folder and Voila! I could see network shares!
I 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. Again they said that no changes were made to the network at all.
Another unsolved mystery perhaps but I didn't care. No longer would I need to go through a Windows interface for network share
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Let's say you're running a network of 160 desktops. 20 of those people would like to bring in their personal laptop, a Mac, Ipaq, etc. You then have to consider the security of the other 140 desktops. Corporate IT will be held responsible if YOUR personal laptop screws their network. YOU will not. So if someone "slips something by" Corporate IT, and it screws something, is virus infected, not locked down, then it is suddenly their problem to fix.
Can't always batter the Braindead IT Department. Companies have standards for a reason. I can't trust that J Random Developer knows how to secure his shit. In fact, I would always, 100% of the time, bet that he doesn't. After seeing some of the poorly maintained, hacked 10 ways from sunday developer desktops I have, my default policy would be to say "no".
I like music
A month or two in the laboratory can often save an hour or two in the library.
This seems to be doubly so. Here's my computer corollary:
A month or two of hacking can often save an hour or two on Google.
When was this, ten years ago under windows NT 3.0? Or were you just using an inflexible security model? Nine years ago I set up an NT 3.51 server for a cross platform network and had no issues with the Mac security side. NT was full of security holes, of course, and getting patches was a bigger pain.
2. Mac doesnt have any real kind of client software that allows it to attach to an NT network (much less an AD network). Quite unlike Windows, which can connect to ANY other network (Netware, Apple, Unix, etc), and still be secure.
This is just so many kinds of wrong you need to be slapped.
a. Mac OSX is built off a BSD core, so unless you care to claim Samba is a myth and BSD doesn't network well, you're just talking out of your a**.
b. Yeah, I tried to hook my Windows box up to an NFS share just now. Guess what! It doesn't work out of the box. Tried to connect it to an old Appletalk network. Guess what! It doesn't work out of the box (Server can act as a Appletalk server, but cant connect to another). There's lots of other stuff a Windows box won't connect to either.
This guy needs to learn what he is talking about, but thats a tall order. Its so much easier to just bitch and whine.
Unlike a reasonable and intelligent poster like yourself.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Would it be best if I could give our people who do graphics Macs, and run our website off Linux, and provide the accounting department with the latest and greatest version of Excel? You bet, they would all love it. But then I'd have to staff the FTE to keep up with three different systems' worth of problems and patches and interoperability quirks and maintain up to date expertise in all of them.
That's the attitude that baffles me. Instead of giving the users the best tools to do their jobs better and faster, give them all the same tools so IT can do their job better and faster. Is that really a cost effective way to operate a business?
Sounds like a construction company where the carpenter, the plumber, the electrician, and the painter are all given the same basic set of tools and told to build a house.