At 07:14 PM 12/17/2005, you wrote:
A small business has a small P2P LAN consisting
of four XP Home, one W2K-Server, and one Mac OS
X boxes. It also uses one of those stand-alone
Seagate NT-based LAN hard drives, which at the
moment is attached to the Mac for back up.
Because they have all the boxes sharing folders
with all the others, XP Home doesn't like that:
XP Home allows only up to five shared
connections, and it can't attach to NT domains.
While only using the W2K for sharing will cure
the max connection limitation, it seems OS X has
problems reliably accessing NTFS partitions.
Does anyone know if there is an inherent problem
with OS X accessing NTFS, or might this be
merely a misconfiguration? I know that Linux
NTFS write support is considered experimental,
but I know next to nothing about OS X.
One obvious solution is to replace all the XP
Home OSes with XP Pro, which solves the max
client limitation, but still leaves the Mac
problem. But I'd like to suggest a cheaper (part+labor) solution if possible.
Another solution might be a Linux-based Samba
server, but will XP Home be able to authenticate to Samba?
So, two main questions:
1) Can OS X reliably access (read and write) NTFS partitions?
2) Can XP Home authenticate to Samba?
First of all, the Samba access does not care what
file system is on the other end. It can access
FAT, VFAT, NTFS, etc. and you see the file
system. In common terms, it is called a Common
Internet File System (CIFS). CIFS is an enhanced
version of Microsoft's open, cross-platform
Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, the native
file-sharing protocol in the Windows 95, Windows
NT®, and OS/2 operating systems and the standard
way that millions of PC users share files across
corporate intranets. CIFS is also widely
available on Unix, VMS, and other platforms.
That said, the Mac OS-X platform has no problem
using the CIFS shares on Microsoft Windows
platforms. Of course, the newer versions such as
Tiger (10.4) have the most up-to-date versions of
the software. I have no problem accessing Linux,
Windows XP, or Windows 2003 shares from my iBook.
If XP Home authenticates to other XP boxes, it
can authenticate to a Samba share on a Linux box.
--
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Brinkley Harrell
http://www.fusemeister.com
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