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Samba is the result of some clever reverse-engineering to create reliable Windows file sharing without the headaches of a Windows server. Mac OS X clients can also use these shares, making Samba a great option for cross-platform environments. It’s not a common scenario to use an Open Directory server to control Linux systems, but here’s how to do it if you have one already, and want to use Samba on Linux with your OD users.  If you are finding the Xserve platform to be a little out of your budget for the amount of performance you get, or you don’t want to administrate yet another Mac OS X Server system, this could be a great alternative to an AFP solution for your Macs.

We could host SMB shares directly on our OD server, but ideally we keep our OD server just as a directory and authentication server, and let other servers do the file sharing heavy lifting. More »

One of my clients is a small group of Mac users in a large, Windows-centric company. The Mac’s use ADmitMac to authenticate against Active Directory for user login and to mount network shares. One user suddenly stopped being able to mount network shares, either as a login item or manually using “Connect to Server”. The symptom when logging in is an error dialog, one for each share, that states “tss\_check\_cifs is not running”. I checked Activity Monitor and tss\_check\_cifs what gives? I check the logs, and there’s nothing. I try mounting the share manually, and the symptom then is the blue barber shop bar comes up for a few seconds like normal, then nothing no mount, no error, no log, no anything.

I know it’s not Kerberos or time being off or DNS or anything basic like that, because she can still authenticate and log in successfully. I Google the error and there’s two pages, neither has anything to do with this situation. I go as far as uninstalling and reinstalling ADmitMac with no improvement. Sigh.

Finally, after several hours of pulling my hair out, trying everything short of archive and install, I break down and call Thursby’s tech support (I figure I’ve done enough RTFM’ing at this point) and the first thing off the guy’s tongue is “Oh yah, that’s a bug. Apple changed the way startup items work after 10.4.6. Here’s a link to a pre-release build that fixes the issue.” The official update should be out soon. Until then, here’s Thursby’s number: 1-817-478-5070.

##Belarc Advisor

Coming from the world of Mac troubleshooting we have been used to being able to quickly get a listing of hardware and software on a system simply by invoking [Apple System Profiler](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_System_Profiler). Microsoft does not provide a way to gather such detailed information with their built-in utilities. If you have ever had to figure out what model of video card or motherboard is in a PC, especially when the drivers aren’t installed yet, you know that you often have to resort to physically inspecting the hardware.

Belarc Advisor is a free (for personal use) utility that runs on Windows that generates a nicely formatted html report detailing the specific hardware and software present on that system. It is compatible with Windows versions from Windows 95 up to Vista. Creating inventories of Windows boxen is a hassle without it.

You can download it here: [http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html](http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html)

##SIW

[System Information for Windows (SIW)](http://www.gtopala.com/) is another good option for gathering system profile information. It doesn’t require the installation of any software which is nice if you are inventorying sytems that you don’t want to modify.