Help setting up New Mac on network

[Adam Raff]

Good day,

Some time ago I posted something and I received some great help and so now I
am following up on that with some new questions that related to my last post

I hope somebody here can point me in the right direction. We have a small
company which is mostly PC based. Do to what we do, we also have two Mac's.
The Mac's connect via finder to our network shares and the user logs into
the network with his normal logon to gain access. The Mac is not part of
the domain from what I can tell though I did find one of the Mac listed in
computers but when I looked to see if the Mac was bound to the Domain it was
not. Since I now have a new Mac I would like to
set it up right.

The issue that I am having is that the Macvol is very large and has health
issues. From posting and reading stuff on this forum and other forums I got
recommendations
to either buy Dave or AdmitMac. I really do not use Policy that much just
on the PC for WSUS and some minor stuff. The way the Mac login now seems Ok
and from what I understand either Dave or ADmitMac will solve my issue with
the MacVol and I can turn off Mac services and the apple protocol. I did
look at ExtremeIP and I felt that was a little over kill for us. From
what I understand the two programs should also solve my name resource issues
and
font issues since the program saves the resources in a better format or
cleaner.

I am very new with Mac, our Mac people I feel know less then I do at times
so what I would like if possible is some pro's and Con's on this and what
product would be better Dave or ADmitMac?

Any help or insight would be most appreciated
Adam Raff

 

[William M. Smith]

The issue that I am having is that the Macvol is very large and has health
issues. From posting and reading stuff on this forum and other forums I got
recommendations
to either buy Dave or AdmitMac. I really do not use Policy that much just
on the PC for WSUS and some minor stuff. The way the Mac login now seems Ok
and from what I understand either Dave or ADmitMac will solve my issue with
the MacVol and I can turn off Mac services and the apple protocol. I did
look at ExtremeIP and I felt that was a little over kill for us. From
what I understand the two programs should also solve my name resource issues
and
font issues since the program saves the resources in a better format or
cleaner.

Hi Adam!

You have two situations from what I understand. The first is that you have
health issues with your server's Mac volume and the second is that you'd
like to know the "best" way to have your Mac connect to your server/network.
These are mutually exclusive to each other and changing one doesn't affect
the other.

First, if you think your server's Mac volume health is poor then how you
connect to the server doesn't necessarily affect its health. Windows
Server's File Services for Macintosh uses AFP 2.2. This means that you're
limited to 31-character long file names and shouldn't have more than 65,000
files per shared Mac volume. If you have more than this on your Mac volume,
try creating more Mac volumes and storing fewer files in each volume. Keep
the number of files per folder to a few hundred so that your Mac doesn't
have to retrieve the entire list (thousands?) of files for a single folder
or volume. This is more about file management, which can impact any server's
performance.

Second, if you're the sole Mac user or one of just a very few (compared to
the number of Windows users accessing the server), then I suggest using
something like Dave or ADmitMac from http://www.thursby.com and disabling
File Services for Macintosh on the server. This puts the burden of the
connection on the Mac and lessens the administrative overhead on your
server.

Dave is ideal for environments where Active Directory isn't used or
required. ADmitMac is ideal for Active Directory environments. I suggest
that if your company uses Active Directory then your Mac should be a good
network citizen and use Active Directory as well.

You're correct that ExtremeZ-IP may be overkill for your area, but if you
_require_ AFP connectivity then I recommend it instead Thursby's products. A
10-user ExtremeZ-IP license is about $1400, but it provides long file name
support and extended permissions that Windows users use. And AFP is the
Mac's native file sharing protocol.

I will never recommend using Apple's built-in SMB capabilities unless your
Macs have only the _occasional_ need for sharing with Windows users and can
all connect via SMB (not a mix of AFP and SMB). The hidden files caused by
this method confuse Windows users and the method of storing files can cause
problems for AFP-only clients (Mac OS 9).

Hope this helps! bill