Mac OS X

Bill Chin bchin at mdimension.com
Tue Jan 30 04:30:47 GMT 2001


On Monday, January 22, 2001, at 10:18 AM, ctooley at amoa.org wrote:
> I'm in the position of having to integrate a Mac into an all Windows network. 
> I'm tempted to ask them to hold off on the integration (and run standalone for a 
> couple monthes) until the release of OS X.  At that time I'd at least know 
> something about the OS and how to use it.

You should take a look at http://www.apple.com/macosx, http://www.stepwise.com/, and a series of articles on Mac OS X on http://www.arstechnica.com/. That should get you started. You can also visit the various traditional Mac OS news and support websites all over the place, most of which have some coverage of Mac OS X.

For the server version of Mac OS X, also look at http://www.apple.com/macosx/server/. 

>  What I'm wondering is if there is a 
> release of Samba for OS X and if so how well is integrated into the system. 

Samba 2.0.7 works "out of the box" for Mac OS X Public Beta. I have an binary installer for the earlier version of Mac OS X Server 1.x at http://www.mdimension.com/Samba/. My version includes the ability to look up printers from NetInfo (a distributed directory service that is a native part of Mac OS X). The integration at this point with public releases of Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server is much like any other *BSD operating system. Samba can serve up both from UFS and HFS+ filesystems.

The server version of Mac OS X will have CIFS/SMB support. Unfortunately, since this is a closed source project with NDA's surrounding it, there hasn't been much news. MacWEEK among others are reporting that it will integrate Samba for it's CIFS/SMB server functionality.

As for a SMB client, there isn't a port of libsmb yet. There are commercial alternatives, including Sharity and DAVE. Sharity is available for Mac OS X Server 1.x and Mac OS X Public Beta now. DAVE is available for Mac OS < X, and Thursby has announced that they will have a Mac OS X version coming. I am personally interested in working on a SMB client, but time constraints have pushed it to the back burner. It also depends on how reasonably priced the commercial alternatives end up.

Another way of integrating Mac OS X is to use more traditional UNIX services, including NIS and NFS. LDAP is another way to go. Microsoft has some UNIX services products that you may be able to utilize. YMMV.

..Bill Chin
M Dimension Technology




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