File Sharing Mac to PC

Well I finally found some information direct from Apple which, at least, lets me understand whats going on.

To recap our old I-Mac worked juts fine on our Windows and NAS network until we upgraded to OS 10.6. The MacbookPro, which runs 10.6 has never worked correctly.

For example we can create a folder on one of the NAS servers but when we try and copy a file to it we are informed we do not have permission, we also do not get the message until the file has copied over and then is rejected, a process that takes a long time with a large file.

Well it seems that Apple stopped supporting Appletalk protocol with 10.6, why this make a difference, I don't know, but it does.

The bottom line, in order to move files from the Mac to the PC network we have to use an external drive - i.e. move files from the Macs to USB drive then move USB drive to any PC and move the files from the USB drive to the NAS server. Of course on the PC's we simply save to the network drive.

I am sure that I am doing something wrong but I did call Apple Care and had my call escalated to a "specialist" and he could not help at all. Except by saying that Mac's might not support NAS drives!

MacbookPro = Double the price and complexity (but it does look pretty!)

More Permission Issues

Oh my god what a pain OSX Leopard is. Do they call it Leopard because it's scary and untrainable. How about being able to do a SIMPLE task like copy a file from a Mac to a NAS network drive running Linux.

Most of the thousands of posts about this suggest opening up terminal and using Unix line command, what is this fucking MS-DOS

Great!

Here's another great feature of the Mac (not) so this morning I opened a file on the network, adjusted it and saved it. Then a little later I opened it again, printed it and went to close the file and it gave me an " cannot save this file because of permissions" message.

No matter I thought, I have not changed it since I saved so I just closed it. The file has now gone! Disappeared . . . wha . . .the f . . .

File Permissions - This time with Zipped files

I think I have mentioned before the nightmares we are having with file permissions on the Macs with Leopard. I guess it's because, like Windows, everyone is worried about security. Judging by the thousands of posts you will find if you type "Leopard Permissions" into Google I am not alone (the first post is Leopard permission Nightmare).

Today I received a two files from a student, both of which were zipped on a Mac at school. Can extracted them on any of the Macs here NO. Windows can!

It's a real P*I*T*A that every small job I try to do on the Mac offers up some kind of roadblock that make me go back to my trusty Vaio.

New kind of Crash

Wednesday another Pizza wheel of death but this time with Finder, trying to connect to a Network drive it just stopped and finder crashed, on trying to re-open finder I get "The application finder can't be opened -10810".

I did a survey of Windows users on the network and over the same period of time, i.e. since we have had the Macbook Pro, we have NOT had any crashes, no fictional blue screens of death, nothing. Our I-Mac, which has recently been upgraded to Leopard and has limited use, thankfully, has only crashed twice in the same period - but we don't use it much.

I was running Photoshop, Skype was open and Open Office.

Printing Issues

Today, after Photoshop did it's daily crash and I rebooted, (I was working on a 240 dpi file of 35" x 25" with 20 or so layers) I sent a file to print.

It seems that, unlike Windows systems, if you send a file to the printer (in this case an Epson 11880 using IP) and the paper is not loaded, then you load the paper, it will just sit there until you pause the printer and re-start it in the control panel. Again no big deal once you know it happening but on Windows systems it would start printing one the paper was loaded without intervention.

Crash Report

Photoshop Crashed badly after opening a 1.5 Gbyte file, changing it a little and saving. PShop did not want to cooperate so I closed all other applications, no luck. I then force quit Photoshop through the Finder although it did not say it was not responding. Tried to re-start and once again the spinning Pizza wheel of death.

Left it spinning for some time and then did a hard reset - the second today.

Information: The 1.5 Gbyte file was created and edited on my Windows 7 Vaio with no problems except those normally associated with editing such a big file.