Networking Nightmare III: Mac to the mix

So I took on the Mac, adding it to my Win 98, XP, Vista and Linux home network project.

But first, let me explain something about yesterday’s post, about adding Linux.

I’m not critical of Linux. I like Linux. I think it’s very cool that the user community (and a few companies) have cooperatively produced such an accomplished OS, or group of OS flavors, or whatever you call it.

I really admire the talented programmers who volunteer their time on this.

I was critical of the documentation. It was sloppy. A couple people commented I should volunteer to help fix it. Ok, I knew that would happen. But even if I had the time, I can't work on a project that I might write about for CW.

Take a deep breath

Of course, some people were ticked off. All I can say is: relax. It’s an experiment. It’s a learning thing. It’s an editorial project.

I’m using Win 98 because I have it. I want to see if it can be done. I know it’s old, but the CW server logs do show several thousand Win 98 users each month.

So there’s no OS criticism going on here. Believe me, I know a sure way to generate page views and comments is to attack the Mac or Linux (or even mention Amiga OS!). I’m not taking that route – at least today.

Mac attack

Anyway, on to the Mac. Right off the bat, it could access shares on every other machine, with the OS X “Finder>Go>Connect to Server” function, using the SMB protocol.

On the corporate net, I connect via Apple Filing Protocol, or AFP. And speaking of Macs, nightmares and the enterprise, "Mac Management Nightmares" is a good read.

On my home net, I can connect in multiple ways, using the machine’s “name” such as “smb://user@p4.home,” for example, or using the IP address such as “smb://192.168.1.2.”

And going the other way, XP connected to its shares fine. Linux connected fine. But at first, Vista wouldn’t connect, it displayed the dreaded log-in box.

The first couple username/password combinations I tried didn’t work. I thought, “Oh no, here we go again,” fearing a repeat of the Linux debacle.

I was trying to type in another username/password combination with a different username format when I accidentally hit some key (not sure which) and it connected before I was done. I don’t know what happened. I restarted Vista to try to duplicate the behavior but I never got the log-in box again – it just connects.

Just another mystery I’ll probably never understand.

Strange things indeed

Networking is bizarre. On seemingly every machine, things change for no apparent reason. For example, a Vista network map might not show all the machines on the net, but doing a refresh makes them all appear – or vice-versa.

When I first installed Linux, it showed up in the WORKGROUP workgroup by default. So did the Mac. The others were in a HOME workgroup. That didn’t seem to affect anything.

In troubleshooting, I changed the workgroup of the Linux machine to HOME to see if that affected anything. I don’t think it did. I changed it back and now it doesn’t show up in the WORKGROUP map on Vista. Actually, when I start the network map app, it appears by itself (the Mac should be there also ) until I refresh and then it disappears, replaced by the Mac.

I know that earlier, all machines were displayed in their appropriate workgroups.

And the Mac’s networking name has changed. When I first connected it to the network, it was seen as “new-host.” Later, it started showing up as “Mac002332b2e890.” I don’t know why. I noticed “00-23” is the beginning of the machine’s MAC address, but the remainder of the number is different (unless one or the other is in some non-decimal format).

And sometimes certain machines might not be recognized by another, but restarting one or the other makes them appear. Maybe it has something to do with the boot-up order or something.

Somebody give me a clue

A lot of random things happen that I just don’t have a clue about. For example, today my Vista and XP machines couldn’t ping each other. I could connect through the GUIs fine and share files, but the pings didn’t work. All the others did. And I’m pretty sure the XP-Vista pings worked earlier. I don’t get how computers can share files if they can’t ping one another on the network.

Anyway, I got Vista working both ways with the Mac. Although now it looks like the Linux box has disappeared. But hey, I’m not going to touch that right now – it worked earlier, and that’s good enough for me.

Win 98, again

So everything worked until it came to my old friend Win 98. It brought up the dreaded log-in box and no combination of usernames/passwords seems to work, just like what happened with Linux.

A networking saavy poster told me this would happen. He wrote: “You'll most likely need to incorporate the same Linux fix with the OSX machine. Remember, under the pretty GUI both Ubuntu and OSX are ‘Unix’ that share a common thread.”

I don’t know how to do that fix on the Mac, but I’m going to take a good shot at finding out.