Mac shares on Server 2003

Todays challenge was to get file sharing working for MacOS 9 clients on our new Windows 2003 server.

Installing "Services for Macintosh" is straight forward, and as such I won't go into that here (if you are stuck at this point then here is a hint for you: in "Add / Remove Programs" there is a "Windows Components" section, you install it from there).

Once it was installed, I created a new Macintosh share (and received a warning that the share would be created as read-only for mac clients).

But when trying to browse to the server from the Macs - I couldn't see the server at all.

The reason for this turns out to be simple. We have two onboard network adapters on the server, but are only using one of them. The AppleTalk network protocol will only work against a single card in the machine, and it had associated itself with the wrong one. Ticking the "Accept inbound connections on this adapter" checkbox in the "Appletalk Network Protocol" on the active card (and selecting the correct Appletalk zone from the pulldown list) was enough to get this working.

Well, nearly. The server showed up OK, but none of the clients could connect to it. They get an authentication error instead.

To get this working, first launch the server manager (right-click on "My Computer" and choose "Manage"), then right-click on "Shared Folders" and select "Configure File Server for Macintosh". The default authentication type will be "Microsoft only". Change it to "Apple Cleartext or Microsoft".

Now the Mac clients can log in.

But wait - the share is still read only!

To sort this call up the properties of the share (in the server manager) and untick the "This volume is read-only" checkbox that is selected by default(!).

And there we have it. Job done!