[ILUG] Mac's and Wintel and Linux....

[Niall O Broin]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2001 at 08:51:46AM -0000, Dunphy Richard-rdunph01 wrote:

> > Any considerations for mixing macs and pc's with a samba 
> > server?
> 

> Surely you need AppleTalk for the Macs, unless you've shelled out for some
> expensive it of software to allow you to see windows shares?!

There is some software called Dave something or other which allows Macs to
see SMB filesystems i.e. it's basically an SMB client for Macs but it's
expensive enough and it's a per client license.

> I know SuSE 7.0 come as default with a script to start the appletalk
> server (/sbin/init.d/atalk start), not too sure about RH! It's the atalkd
> daemon you need to setup and run to do this...

so this is what you use instead of Dave. It's called Netatalk, and it's for
Macs what Samba is for 'doze PCs. I have it running on just the spec. of
machine you mentioned with a network of ~10 Macs and it works just fine.

> And it works ok! A bit slow if you ask me, but when you get logged in to
> the Linux Server it's fairly nippy! I've actually had it running here for

Netatalk's slowness is largely down to the cruddiness of Appletalk as a
protocol. If you use Appletalk (and you must load the relevant kernel
module/compile in support to your kernel to do that) your Macs will be able
to browse the network and see the Linux server. 

However, you can (with recent releases of MacOS) mount filesystems from a
server by specifying its IP address. This saves having Appletalk
running and gives you considerably faster transfer rates but you can't see
the server in the chooser (because Appletalk is necessary for the server
"Here I am" broadcasts). Of course to use IP your Macs must also be running
IP - probably are already, but if not, there's that extra administration to
be considered.



Regards,



Niall