Why Use a Mac?

By Jerry Pournelle

January 5, 2004

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Column 281 (Continued from the Previous Week)

One-Way Networking

It's not really one-way: If you sit at the Mac after getting it on the Windows Active Directory network, everything works. You can see any machine on the Windows net that wants to be seen, and you can copy any file set up to be shared. You can also write to any folder you have permission to write to. This all works exactly as does the Windows network accessing other PCs, and you can do this without Thursby AdmitMac although you will have a lot of trouble doing it; it's a lot easier with Thursby.

Alas, if you go to one of the Windows machines and try to access the Mac, it's not so simple. With Active Directory and Windows Sharing it won't work at all. If you use AdmitMac, you can read from folders the Mac has designated for sharing, but writing to them is another matter. That can be done, but it takes setting things properly: The Mac defaults are much more secure than the Windows systems are set to be.

Workgroups

The networking problems are peculiar to connections to a Windows Domain. If your Windows network is a Workgroup, connecting the Mac to it should be very simple; at least I am told it is. I haven't tried it, but I get reports that "You just do it," and "It Just Works."

Don't Let Your Mac Go To Sleep

It took a while to get the housekeeping out of the way, but we've done that, and Ariadne is now part of the family. We can concentrate on finding the cool things she can do.

First, though, a warning. I don't know if it was this way with the previous versions of Mac OS X, but version 3 caches a lot of stuff—and forgets most of it if the machine goes to sleep. The power settings default to having the machine sleep after some ludicrously short time even if it is connected to mains power, so at first Ariadne kept forgetting all kinds of things like network connections and where her external hard drive was and what was connected to the USB port. Once I figured out that her absent-mindedness was due to sleeping too often, I set things so she only sleeps when on battery power, and never sleeps when connected to the mains.

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