Brinkley Harrell wrote:
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.
It seems that Samba does not access the file system on the attaching
client, whatever the filesystem (Samba being the server, not the
client). So yes, it does stand to reason that Samba doesn't care about
the client's filesystem.
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 doesn't quite fully address my question regarding XP being able to
authenticate to an NT domain. See below.
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.
That may answer the Mac question, but I need some clarification. Can the
Mac read and write to a native NTFS filesystem running on a Windows
2000, or XP Home system?
If XP Home authenticates to other XP boxes, it can authenticate to a
Samba share on a Linux box.
Windows XP Home can NOT access an NT domain server, regardless of the
Windows Server's filesystem. Micro$oft purposely crippled XP Home this
way; they expect that if you need to attach to an NT domain, you will
buy XP Pro.
Are you saying that XP Home *can* access a Samba server /acting as a
Windows NT domain server/? If so, then Samba is the obvious (and least
expensive) solution for this network.
--
Best Regards,
~DJA.
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