Samba Under OS X?

iriefrank asks: "Thursby Software announced it will demonstrate a Mac OS X version of its popular DAVE filesharing software. It will include peer-to-peer file and print sharing between PCs and Macs, but now that Mac OS has UNIX underpinnings (and uses BSD networking), could one easily port SAMBA to OS X?" Just to be fair, could someone familiar with DAVE let us know if it offers anything more than what one can get with SAMBA?

Samba is being used on OS X

[Crewd]

Check out these two urls that explain how to use samba on OS X :

http://osx.macnn.com/features/installsamba.phtml
http://www2.kenyon.edu/people/shankb/samba/

What about NFS?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm more curious if anybody has gotten NFS to work properly in OSX. It seems to be able to mount shares fine, but whenever you try to access (or unmount for that matter), the system seems to sort of freak out. Is this something that netinfo is overriding than the standard unix utilities? (It seems netinfo overrides /etc and just about everything else by shoving its nose everywhere in libc and leaving hooks as it goes).

Re:What about NFS?

[extra88]

A recent MacWeek article spells out out to mount and use NFS shares from other machines. It also says creating NFS shares under OSX isn't working yet.

http://macweek.zdnet.co m/2 000/10/29/1103jcwosx2unix.html [zdnet.com]

Dave != Samba. And Samba on OS X is okay, but...

[hatless]

DAVE is primarily an SMB client for the Mac. It performs the function of the Linux/BSD smbmount utility, allowing a Mac to attach to SMB fileshares as transparent volumes. It also includes a Network Neighborhood-like network/share browser, and allows users to connect to SMB printers through the Chooser. It can do filesharing in the other direction, but that's not its main job, and you'll seldom see the classic MacOS version running a serious SMB fileserver. Maybe performance will be better in the OS X port.

Samba is primarily an SMB fileserver, and mostly overlaps with Dave in its ability to act as an SMB print client, and on a few OSes can also act as an SMB file-access client via smbmount.

OS X can run Appleshare IP Server, a package that can also act as an SMB fileserver, and has nice admin tools for doing so.

Beyond open-source religious issues and the nominal cost of Appleshare IP Server, the main reasons to run Samba on OS X are as follows:

1. Authentication against NT domains rather than against the MacOS users/groups or whatever the given Mac is authenticating against
   
2. SMB print serving
   
3. SMB print client, for those extremely rare cases when you have a network printer that does speak SMB but doesn't speak Appletalk or LPD, or you're doing job auditing through an SMB print queue
   
4. WIndows PDC functionality
   

DAVE is not recommended

[jbridges]

Want to copy a couple files across the network? DAVE might be fine.

Want to actually run software across the network? Or GASP, actually access files, maybe do cross development with CodeWarrior?

Forget DAVE! Dave is not industrial strength, Dave is flakey, Dave is not ready for prime time.

(by the way, ever try and search Usenet or the web for info on a product with a name so freakin common that you can't find anything? Imagine if Linux was called "John", BLEAH!)

I pounded on the Apple reps at a OSX developer conference in June, they knew nothing about Samba, still towing the "we support cross platform networking" when that basicly means TCP/IP and oh by the way, if you want to share files, use AppleTalk. Some other developers stood up and said people had gotten Samba to run on OSX. But that's not exactly nice and friendly, and built into the pretty little interface, is it?

The saving grace at this point is the pretty decent Appletalk support over TCP/IP built into Win2000. Without it, cross platform file access from a Mac to Windows would be pretty grim...

samba/dave

[bjpirt]

I used to use DAVE when I was running OS9 and although it was extremely flaky, would often bring the machine down and was quite slow, It did provide two-way access to a windows network. You could mount windows shares as well as showing up in the network neighbourhood. Now I am using OSX I installed Samba and there is no way I would want to go back to DAVE, Samba is (Much) faster, completely stable, and extremely customizable, particularly when it comes to user permissions. When I want to mount a windows share, I use sharity, as smbmount is not available for darwin.

Dave is not hip

[Sebby]

I've had similar problems with Dave as described above, but mostly I found it to be much slower than using AppleTalk.

On the odd occasion I need to transfer files to a PC, I just install the demo version of PCMacLan from Miramar. Transfers are much faster, and the demo has a time out of 180 mins (3 hours!!!).

So, given that Dave was useless to me, I doubt they can come out with something useful for OS X. Being that Mac is big on GUI, I'm sure someone will come up with some implementation of Samba that will make it transparent in OS X.

Re:Dave != Samba. And Samba on OS X is okay, but..

[realkiwi]

Real world use:

My other half does desktop publishing on Mac and on Windows. She scans on one machine. She has Mac text she needs to transfer to Windows and vice versa. She needs to open Win Pagemaker files in Mac and vice versa...

We will be trying Samba / OS X in order to have a little less noise in the living room (no file server running 24/24...)

Both OS print native to the Laserjet.

The windows machine double boots into Linux for connecting to the outside world (it is forbidden to use Windows on the Internet at home for obvious reasons) and burning CD-Roms.

After a weekend with OS X I think that Apple may have a winner.