Print/File Serving to Macs and PC's

drdestructo asks : "I am looking to serve files and printers from a Linux machine to Macs, Linux clients and one Win98 machine (stuborn users!). I need somthing that will work with all three platforms. To the best of my knowledge, MacOS has yet to be infected with SMB, so I think that's out. What else might I use to solve this headache. Right now our solution involves a frightening ftp solution. We currently have printers connected locally to different machines, and use PDF for cross platform compatiablility. There has to be somthing better than this. Please help." To my knowledge there ARE commercial SMB clients available for the Mac, like DAVE. Also, there are Appletalk clients available for Win32... COPSTalk being the one that sticks in my mind the most. Anybody else have any suggestions?

Re:Samba + Netatalk

[bluGill]

Your somewhat incorrect there. Appletalk is not 300kb/s, localTalk is. Apple designed their own signaling/cable system for the early macs, but ALL current macs can use appletalk over ethernet, at ethernet speeds. The new iMac cannot do the old localtalk, AFAIK all others can.

I use netatalk and samba to deal with the mac and windows machines at home, both work well, and the user has no reason to care which they are using. I've never tried sharing printers so I don't know if that works.

Samba + Netatalk

[itamar]

Use Samba for the Windows machines and Netatalk for the Macs. That's all you need - no need to buy software.

Netatalk is AppleShare over AppleTalk, so it's at most 300kb/s, as far as I can tell. So instead get Netatalk+asun (e.g. the RPM in Redhat contrib) which is AppleshareIP and nice and fast. Both are of course free software.

Make sure you're mounting the Mac shares using TCP/IP, not AppleTalk!
--
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Another Option

[Trick]

I ran into the same problem a little while ago, and there's a free way out if you don't want to fork over the cash for a commercial Mac SMB client like DAVE. I ran the Mars Netware emulator and IPX on a Linux box, and then just used the respective platforms' NetWare client (in my case it was Windows, Mac and OS/2) to attach to the shared drives. Works great, and it doesn't cost a dime.

Samba with netatalk

[colonel]

I do the exact same thing here at my work, using the latest Samba RPM and the latest netatalk+asun SRPM from the PPC distro (More up to date than any other RPMs I could find). The trick is that you have to change the way the netatalk SRPM tracks its version number, or you won't be able to make an i386 RPM from it. :)

You should also rebuild samba with the --with-netatalk switch (RTFM) so that it can reasonably handle the resource forks for the apple files (.AppleDouble/). Be careful how your Linux and Window~1 machines handle the resource forks.

Lastly, you should take a close look at how each machine handles text files. Windows, Apple and Linux are all different, and if you serve all those OSes from the same file structure, you'll be opening a new can of worms. Netatalk+asun is supposed to handle CR/LF translation, but for some reason I can only get it to translate when downloading from the server, not when uploading to the server. I posted the problem to a couple of netatalk/atalk mailing lists to no avail.

But, we got around the problem by using CVS to handle file sharing - since we share mostly HTML docs, this has proved to be the best way for text files, though we still use NFS/SMBd/AFPd for other stuff.

Re:Samba + Netatalk -> Hp ???

[drix]

Yeah, that's pretty easy actually. Check the Printing-HOWTO on how to set your /etc/printcap file to create a printer that sends all traffic to an IP address. Most (?) of the HP printers that have Jetdirect built in can do Postscript, so you should be all set. Then just share that "virtual" printer over Appletalk.

DAVE

[The Mayor]

Another commercial offering is DAVE. This comes out of some company in Australia, I believe. It offers windows networking on a macintosh. As such, you can use Samba to offer file & print serving to a windows network, with the mac attached as a PC client or server.

Re:Samba + Netatalk

[YellowBook]

Sharing printers works fine. I've set it up using SAMBA for the windows machines and netatalk for the Macs. Netatalk requires rather more set-up for print serving, but the advantage is that you can use non-postscript printers with the "LaserWriter 8" postscript driver on the Mac for a very cheap network printing solution.