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This article appeared in the November 2001 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
There's some common mythology in networking circles that it's hard make Windows PCs and Macs talk to each other. This seems to be one of those "facts" passed down through the generations that's hard to debunk because it's "known to be true" in certain circles. Of course, those circles usually don't contain any serious Mac users. You can usually tell you're corresponding with one of these guys because they invariably use MAC instead of Mac, as if they think MAC is just one more acronym in an already too long list of such jargon. One of them once patiently explained to me that MAC is short for Macintosh Apple Computer.
The truth is that PCs and Macs can easily share files and printers on a network, with the help of a piece or two of inexpensive software.
The problem is that traditionally Apple has used Appletalk and more recently Appleshare/IP as the protocol for sharing files and talking to printers, while Windows has several different protocols, the older NetBEUI and the more recent SMB/CIFS over TCP/IP. It's as though Macs and PCs speak different languages. There are several ways to translate.
Three products for the classic Mac operating system that allow it to access Windows shares are DAVE and MacSOHO from Thursby Software (www.thursby.com) and DoubleTalk from Connectix (www.connectix.com). If you're riding a lone Mac set adrift in a sea of PCs, and your network administrator won't help with your MAC problems, any of these three products can help.
The oldest and most capable of the three is DAVE. When installed on a Mac, it gives access to standard Windows file and print services including Windows NT/2000 domains. It also lets Windows users access Mac drives via their Network Neighborhood. Fom the Windows side, the Mac running DAVE looks like a plain old Windows NT server. DAVE implements the standard SMB/CIFS file and print sharing protocols on the Mac and understands NetBIOS for name services.
Once installed, DAVE is easy to use. Mac users can go to the familiar Chooser to find Windows resources, or use the DAVE browser software installed under the Apple menu. To have Macintosh volumes and printers appear in the Windows network neighborhood, there is a control panel to configure what to share and with whom.
I've been running DAVE 2.5.2 for several months on two machines with Macintosh OS 9.1 and 9.2.1. It pretty much works as advertised, connecting to both my Windows 98 machine and Samba on my Linux box. The only anomalies I've noticed are that it seems to sometimes stop the Mac from going to sleep, and transfers from the Mac to the PC are much slower than transfers in the other direction, when the PC volume is mounted via the Chooser. Tansferring via the DAVE Browser speeds things up considerably.
DoubleTalk 1.1 is a newer, less polished program that can do about half the tricks that DAVE does. In particular, it allows the Mac to see Windows SMB/CIFS shares and printers, but doesn't return the favor, allowing the PCs to see its shared volumes and printers.
DoubleTalk's interface is patterened after the Mac's TCP/IP and AppleTalk control panels, but it's a little confusing to use from the Chooser. To mount a Windows share, you must click on the Chooser's AppleShare icon and then select the share from the DoubleTalk zone. This is a strange way to do things because the Windows machine isn't an AppleShare server. This looks like a case of shoehorning the program into the Mac interface instead of taking the time to design a proper paradigm in the Chooser. Of course, they do include the DoubleTalk Mounter, a separate program that makes mounting shares a lot more rational.
When it works, it's simpler and cleaner than DAVE. Unfortunately, my experience was that it had trouble connecting to the Samba shares from my Linux machine and couldn't see the PostScript printer shared from the Windows 98 PC. Since the Samba shares are meant to mimic a Windows NT server, I fear that it wouldn't work well in a network full of NT machines.
The third product in the list is another from Thursby, called MacSOHO. Unlike the previous two programs, it doesn't use the SMB/CIFS protocols, but instead relies on the much older NetBEUI protocol. Since NetBEUI isn't usually installed with recent versions of Windows, MacSOHO requires you to drag out your Windows install disk in order to bind NetBEUI to your Ethernet interface.
Once you've got everything installed, you launch MacSOHO from the Mac and browse to the PC you want to access. It creates a shared files folder on the Mac desktop. On the PC side, you see the contents of the shared files folder inside the My Networks folder. The contents can be used as regular files on either of the networked computers.
MacSOHO is a quick and effective file sharing program for small networks, such as those in a home office--hence the name. It works pretty well for this, but it does lack the printer sharing and other advanced features of DAVE.
Those who've made it this far have probably noticed two of the three products mentioned above come from Thursby Software, a small company based in Arlington, Texas. Over the last few years , they've started calling themselves "The file share folks" and they've built up an impressive stable of networking programs. Besides DAVE and MacSOHO, they also publish MacNFS, which turns the Mac into an NFS client and TSSTalk, which lets a Windows PC access AppleShare and AppleShare IP servers. All this is backed up by friendly and competent tech support.
The products mentioned above are for the classic Macintosh operating system. What about Mac OS X?
In late September, Apple introduced the Mac OS X version 10.1 upgrade--henceforth known as X.1. Mac OS X.1 has built-in client support for SMB/CIFS. This means you can use Windows and Samba Unix servers right from the "Connect to" command in the Finder. Such servers appear in the Finder like any other file server and provide the same functions found in Windows clients. You don't have to install additional software on either the server or your Macintosh, making it easy to integrate your Mac into a Windows network.
In the other direction--sharing X.1 files with PCs--the open-source BSD heritage really comes to the rescue. Samba, the standard SMB/CIFS for Unix was immediately ported to OS X. It's free for downloading in either compiled or source code versions (www.samba.org), and works well.
Samba owns a well-deserved reputation for having a steep learning curve. There are about a zillion possible settings to fine-tune its behavior, and a novice user can easily become flummoxed. One solution is to install Samba's Web configuration utility, but this requires you to also run the Apache Web server software, which can be at least as complex to configure as Samba.
There will soon be an alternative for the rest of us on X.1. Before the end of the year, Thursby Software will be introducing DAVE 3.1 for X.1.
For the last few months, Thursby has been running an open beta of DAVE on Mac OS X 10.0.4. It had some rough edges, but did work. With the release of X.1, their beta ceased functioning, and it will be turned into the next version of the shipping product.
These aren't the only products that integrate Macs into a Windows network; they're merely the most common. A good source of more information is the MacWindows Web site (www.macwindows.com).
At the time this was written, the speaker at the November 27 LCS meeting had not yet been announced.
The Louisville Computer Society meets on the fourth Tuesday of the month from 7:00-9:00 P.M. at Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road, at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane. Everyone is welcome to attend. For more information, on the Web go to www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.
The LCS also sponsors an e-mail discussion list devoted to Macintosh topics. To join, send e-mail containing only the words "subscribe macgroup" to majordomo@erdos.math.louisville.edu.
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