Mac OS X and networking (desktop, server, how to, Windows)

[Wild Style]

Any network administrators out there supporting Mac OS X? I need suggestions on good books that show how to join domains and file sharing and such for Mac OS X. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[macroy]

I prefer google or forums to get info like this. Books (and just my opinion) seem to always be a step behind. And in this case, a quick search revealed this article.

From a quick glance... it looks like you'll need a plug-in or a different solution to manage Macs in an AD environment.

To me, the easiest solution is to run a virutual MS desktop on the Mac.. and get your resources that way. But I'd be interested to see what you find out.....

[gbugmiami]

Im going through this at work now. And I wish i wasnt.
We had a trial on an OSX server and life was good, it worked GREAT and did as you would expect. So we didnt buy it. Grr.. Mgmt.

- You can add them to the ad domain simply. But not reliably. We ended up unjoining them. The network accounts would just randomly (more often than not) just 'not be available'. That doesnt work for me. If you made them 'mobile' accounts they would always work, but not necessarily be on the 'networked' account, and the user woudln't know it.
This didnt happen with the server as they authenticated via open dir. (worked great) Make sure yours are patched to the newest version of the os you can get. They made improvements in 10.5.3. This is what we have and still couldn't get it working reliably.

- Shares work and all you just have to get to them via smb. We just ended up putting shortcuts on the desktop. I need to figure out how to script it so the users home windows share shows up when they log in. Short term, i just made a share on a mac that acts as a server for them to store stuf, and its backed up in time machine.

Nothing works as well as it did with the osx server. I dont know of any books, just tinkered until it worked. Boy was relearning ghosting (with a boot camp partition) fun. I don't take ghost for granted anymore! There are (free) solutions for networked ghosting, i just didnt have time to figure it out.