Discussion on:

10 things you should know about connecting Macintosh OS X systems to Windows networks

Have you been successful at connecting Mac OS X systems to a Windows network? What obstacles have you encountered in the process?

At work we have Macs connected to our Windows domain. although you need high speed links to DCs to ensure they stay connected.

Our biggest problem is our SAN. We do not use individual shares for people's home folders, we use a general share and then a folder underneath.

Also, it would be nice to find a way to automatically create a virtual drive or shortcut to the home folder without having to map via the menus. Any ideas?

We have about 7 or 8 Macs on our network as well, and out of all the products that we tested we found that http://www.thursby.com/products/admitmac-eval.html to be the best solution for our needs.
It allows you to join Macs to AD and somewhat resemble behavior that of a pc on the Macs, it even allows for some scripting for logon mounts, printers, etc.
Windows share (cifs/smb) permissions are respected for the most part unless you have funky settings traversing different directories, but I would do some testing before implementing, since SANs tend to behave different.
Let me know if you want me to send you more info on how we do things here.
Have fun,
Rolo Clavero

I've had no problem sharing hard drive or printer resources in both directions from/to an iMac with OS 10.3 and a Windows XP PC over a peer network (workgroup). One area where I have a problem is sharing Mac peripherals other than the primary hard drive or printers, specifically the Mac DVD drive with the PC. I could not get it to work.

If you put a symbolic link to the /Volumes folder in your /
Users/YOURNAME/Public folder than peripherals such as CD-
ROMs and Firewire drives will be available as shares. See this
hint on MacOSXHints.com:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?
story=20060420105632844

I need to do something similar as the DVD issue here; I need to access an external firewire drive that is connected to my Mac, from a PC. I get to the Mac home folder, and all the Mac printers from the PC, but I can not see the external drive. I checked out the MACOSXHINTS page that was linked, but it wasn't clear.

You would think an external hard drive would work but I don't think the Max, i.e. OS X, shares anything but the primary HD and printers.

What I wound up doing was copying the contents of the DVD to the Mac's HD and then I was able to see it and assign a drive letter to it.

If your external HD has more on it than the free space on the Mac HD, then I'm at a loss as to what you could do.

Thanks for the suggestion - but yes, my external hd is much larger than the space I have left on my internal hd.
However, I did find a shareware program called 'sharepoints' that helped with the issue, but now I have a bunch of other issues regarding security & passwords : (

Mac can not support reasonable windows workgroup names. Thre have been some issues such as can not handle a space in a name. For example "Public Affairs" can not be entered into a mac as a workgroup name.

I highly suggest anyone having to integrate Macs into a
Windows domain pickup: Apple Training Series: Mac OS X
System Administration Reference, Volume 1, available on
amazon. It covers directory services, including integration
with Open Directory (apple) LDAPv3 (standard *nix) and
Active Directory.

Also, the work around for macs on a network that
uses .local domains from the windows side (and as a side
note, Apple followed the spec for ZeroConf which
uses .local for multicast DNS, MS acknowledges this when
you setup your AD system stating you will have problems
with .local and macs). The trick is to enter in a .local
search domain in each of your macs network preferences,
as this will have Lookupd check with DNS first before
checking MDNS.

At work our OSX machines are networked to a windows
server and we use a lot of images(newspaper), when viewing
a folder on the server it takes ages for OSX to create the
previews and slows down our workflow.
Any fix for this?
OSX 10.4

I have a problem. My macs on a PC network has an XServe
that they are able to store files on. Whenever a user places a
file or creates a folder that file/folder is owned by them and
no other user has read/write, only write only. How can I
change it so we don't have to change permissions for every
file/folder placed on the xServe?

how do u remove the workgroup created...

if u mistakenly enter the password of the mac in the pc, u can view all the mac data!

how do u undo this

I followed all the steps, but my PC still cannot find my Mac!

Any help on this matter would be very much appreciated.

I want to connect my Mac in to ghet the Internet network from my router which s connected to one of my PCs.

I have entered all the proper protocol data and it is just not connecting. Any help?

has anyone here tried to configure Mac Mail to Exchange 2003?

super...