MAC and NAS B2000

[chris harrison_1]

Another only vaguely NAS questions. The B2000 I just installed needs to be accessible to a dozen or so MAC clients running OS9.2. These machines only seem to see the NAS via Appletalk, not IP. (If I turn appletalk on on the NAS the MACs can find it, if not they can't. The MACs are running Appletalk and Apple's version of IP.) I have a third party application that helps, but that's not my first chioce - how do you make a MAC talk to a B2000 / Windows 2000 server? I know less than nothing about MAC, I touched one once and it burst into flames.....

[Edward Huels]

OS9 for Mac is going to reliy on the AppleTalk protocal to connect to a windows machine. OS X will connect to Windows over TCP/IP natively. So you ptions come to this:

1. Set up Appletalk and File and Print sharing for Mac on the windows machine: This is an administrative pain in the neck but free.

2. You can purchase a third party CIFS client that will work over TCP/IP. This is a good solutions that I found works quite well. Even Outlook 8.2 worked fine. The clients cost about $150 each.

3. Upgrade your machines to OS X. If you have the funds, this is the way to go. OS X is a much better operating system than OS9 and it is much more network friendly. The bad part is that your applications will have to be OSX compliant if they need to access your network shares; for example Office. If it isn't OSX compatible it will still run on the machine, but in an OS9 shell environment. In this environment it will not have access to the OS X network protcols. You would still need to have the third party CIFS client for OS9.

By the way, installing a third party CIFS client for legacy applications on OS X is difficult. Much better to install OS9 and the CIFS client and applications, then do an OS X upgrade.

I'm not a MAC Expert, but I have had to deal with a couple of Macs for a few years, as the president of the company has always ran a MAC.