SMB/CIFS: The dark side of networking

Windows (WFW, NT, 95, and 98) support Netbios over either Netbeui or IP. Netbeui should never be used, but Netbios over IP works ok at UNC-CH. It does reproduce some of the problems of Appletalk, but given that Microsoft is the proverbial 800 lbs Gorilla, it's likely to be around for a while regardless of it's shortcomings.

Personal Comment: For my department, I'm advocating settling on SMB/CIFS as the peer to peer and client to workgroup server standard, and AFS/NFS for client to central server standard. AFS has been a great solution for us in the past, but it doesn't look like it will address the peer to peer or workgroups anytime soon, and SMB/CIFS looks like the best choice. We run worktations and servers under MacOS, UNIX (Solaris and Linux), and Windows (NT, 95, and 98). Appletalk will be around for a good while yet, but we want to start phasing it out. Since fairly good tools exist for support SMB/CIFS under MacOS and Unix, this seems a reasonable approach. Of course, we're not all in agreement on this topic yet....

 

Under OS X 10.2 and higher, there's full SMB/CIFS support built in. For simple sharing, you can use the System Preferences to enable windows file sharing. But since samba's included, you can also tailor your system, including integrating it into a windows server environment. The easiest way to do this is to enable SWAT.

Under 10.1, things were a little more complicated. Client support for windows was included, but not the server. So you could connect to windows servers, but you had to install samba to share files out. More information on this configuration.

Under systems 7.x and 8.x it and OS X prior to 10.1 you need a SMB/CIFS package such as Dave from Thursby. Dave enables your Mac to serve up files to Windows users and also access servers running SMB/CIFS, such as NT, or Samba servers running Unix. ATN purchased Dave for the UNC system, so you get get a license key by contacting the software acquisition group.

 

Problems with Campus Wide Use of SMB/CIFS

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