[ethorteran]

At school I have a big ol' network of a bunch o' windoze machines. They have a dumb "My documents" crap that shows up on the desktop, that is an imperfect link to the network, so the documents follow you arround. Will OSX server make this possible for them as well? I know it does SMB, but I don't wanna advertise something that is not true.

Thanks In Advance

Erik Thorteran
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[ 09-28-2001: Message edited by: ethorteran ]

[waffffffle]

I'm assuming that you have to log on to use the windows machines but not to the Macs. That's what its like on my campus. The part of OS X server that would allow this is Mac Manager, which is also part of ASIP. However there are some issues with Mac Manager, most of which prevented my campus from adopting it to administer the 30 iMacs they have around campus.

Mac Manager can't authenticate against anything but itself, so users would have to have a seperate account for the Macs and the PCs, with potentially different passwords. Our campus, like most, has seperate unix, mail, and NT accounts for each user, and adding anouther account and password would be a nightmare.

Mac Manager also only supports OS 9 client. As of right now, when you log into an OS X box, you can ONLY log into that machine. It would be nice if Apple would include the option to log on to a network (ala every flavor of windoze since 95) as well as the computer itself. Apple would also do themselves a favor to allow users to log on to an NT/2000 network, since that would allow Macs to integrate right in to a PC environment. I really hope they do this.

NetBoot has nothing to do with this. However netboot also only works with OS 9 clients. I really hope this will change soon.

[scarab]

No true.

Mac OS X Server (10.0 and above) supports directory services and can pull in user records from other databases on the network, like LDAP and NetInfo. That means that user accounts are shared among different servers for various services. Also, if I am not wrong, Mac OS X client has the feature to login to external servers or pull in user accounts from other LDAP and NetInfo databases.

Secondly, there are certain features with Macintosh Manager 2.0 and above that are Mac OS X specific, although not all features work with OS X.

What you are asking for is a feature available on Apple Server OSes for some time already. AppleShare IP, Mac OS X Server 1.x and Mac OS X Server 10.x enable administrators to set automatic user-specific sharepoints that mount on the desktop as folders.

IMHO, it is a big security flaw to enable local login and network login simultaneously, unless you want every single stranger to use the computers and the network.

By the way, NetBoot is not a file-server feature. It enables clients to boot off the server so that there is a centralised Operating System image to manage. There is a Linux-counterpart for this too.

[waffffffle]

Sorry, yes, the OS X Server version of Mac Manager can authenticate against LDAP. What it can't authenticate against is NT/2000, which is what's keeping my school away from it.