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Print/File Serving to Macs and PC's

Posted by Cliff on from the talking-between-macs-and-PCs dept.

drdestructo asks : "I am looking to serve files and printers from a Linux machine to Macs, Linux clients and one Win98 machine (stuborn users!). I need somthing that will work with all three platforms. To the best of my knowledge, MacOS has yet to be infected with SMB, so I think that's out. What else might I use to solve this headache. Right now our solution involves a frightening ftp solution. We currently have printers connected locally to different machines, and use PDF for cross platform compatiablility. There has to be somthing better than this. Please help." To my knowledge there ARE commercial SMB clients available for the Mac, like DAVE. Also, there are Appletalk clients available for Win32... COPSTalk being the one that sticks in my mind the most. Anybody else have any suggestions?

2 of 11 comments (clear)

  1. Samba + Netatalk by itamar · · Score: 2

    Use Samba for the Windows machines and Netatalk for the Macs. That's all you need - no need to buy software.

    Netatalk is AppleShare over AppleTalk, so it's at most 300kb/s, as far as I can tell. So instead get Netatalk+asun (e.g. the RPM in Redhat contrib) which is AppleshareIP and nice and fast. Both are of course free software.

    Make sure you're mounting the Mac shares using TCP/IP, not AppleTalk!
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  2. Samba with netatalk by colonel · · Score: 2

    I do the exact same thing here at my work, using the latest Samba RPM and the latest netatalk+asun SRPM from the PPC distro (More up to date than any other RPMs I could find). The trick is that you have to change the way the netatalk SRPM tracks its version number, or you won't be able to make an i386 RPM from it. :)

    You should also rebuild samba with the --with-netatalk switch (RTFM) so that it can reasonably handle the resource forks for the apple files (.AppleDouble/). Be careful how your Linux and Window~1 machines handle the resource forks.

    Lastly, you should take a close look at how each machine handles text files. Windows, Apple and Linux are all different, and if you serve all those OSes from the same file structure, you'll be opening a new can of worms. Netatalk+asun is supposed to handle CR/LF translation, but for some reason I can only get it to translate when downloading from the server, not when uploading to the server. I posted the problem to a couple of netatalk/atalk mailing lists to no avail.

    But, we got around the problem by using CVS to handle file sharing - since we share mostly HTML docs, this has proved to be the best way for text files, though we still use NFS/SMBd/AFPd for other stuff.