Integrating Macs into Existing Environments

This document is intended to gather together useful links on how to integrate macs into existing infrastructures (esp. those at unc, although hopefully the data will be useful to others as well.

Multi-user systems and labs

File Systems

One of the tricks to integration is being able to share files. Sure, the mac is pretty well equipped for basic file system connections, but there are things you can do to make it much easier to use with existing infrastructures.

AFS

AFS is used by a large number of universities, including UNC. If you want to connect to Computer Science's core servers or the Isis complex, you'll need it. Here's a doc describing the options.

SMB/CIFS

This is the native file sharing system used by Windows.

Samba is an open source version of a SMB/CIFS file server. Softrak has a number of samba implementations for OS X listed, but as of 10.2 it's part of the OS (that's what you're turning on when you enable windows file sharing).

Keep in mind that you'll want to watch out for security holes--you should consider configuring the firewall to restrict access to windows shares. Also, if you are part of a domain or active directory services, you'll probably want to use SWAT to configure SAMBA to better integrate into the windows environment. Read through the documentation carefully, tho, it's not a trivial bit of business. Also, at this point this doc is a bit out of date!

Sharity is a commercial version of an SMB/CIFS client, so it lets you mount shares from servers.

Thursby's Dave is good product if you want to configure windows file and printer sharing for your mac, but don't want to get into Samba. UNC has a site license for Dave.

NFS

The venerable unix system for sharing files, NFS presents some security issues, but it still in wide use. Apple's got some basic info on mounting NFS shares