Mac newbie - how to link to PCs?

[Eric Sadoyama]

Hello, this is my first post here. After 20 years of buying and running PCs, I've finally bought my first Mac. Of course, the first thing I need to know is, how do I connect it to my existing home network? It's a pretty mixed setup -- I've got a Wifi-G router that serves some wired PCs and some wireless PCs, running Win98 and WinXP and Linux, and a NAS box running god knows what.

I think I am supposed to use Samba but I can't get it to work right -- the other machines' names show up in the Finder but when I try to connect I get an error message that their aliases are bad. And when I try to fix them, I get told that I don't have the right permissions to do so. Did I set something up wrong? Is this a known problem? What do I do? Thanks in advance for all your help.

Edit: I should mention, before anyone asks, that the Internet connection via the router works fine.

 

[elbirth]

Maybe someone else can help the both of us out, because I've encountered the bad aliases message plenty of times myself.
However, in my experience, I've been able to enter the account name (that I'm using on my Mac) into the login field when I click "connect" and no password and it usually mounts the drive.

I've been able to connect to NTFS partitions this way and read data just fine. But for writing, yeah, you'll likely want to use Samba.

 

[Eric Sadoyama]

I read Networking Windows with Mac OS X and realized that maybe the permissions problem I've been having with getting the Mac to talk to its PC neighbors was with the Windows end, not the OS X end. So I went to my WinXP and Win98 boxes and tried terminating and then re-establishing File and Print Sharing on those machines. Voila, my Mac can now read and write files to these PCs' hard drives. What's more, I was able to configure and send a print job to the laserjet plugged into one of them.

 

[Eric Sadoyama]

I managed to get my Mac to talk to my network attached storage (NAS) box.

From the Finder, I did a ⌘-K to Connect to Server. Then, I entered:

smb://192.168.1.100/public

192.168.1.100 is the IP address for my NAS box. "Public" is the top-level directory on that drive that holds all my other directories -- it was the manufacturer's suggested directory name.

Then, when prompted for SMB/CIFS File System Authentication, I entered:

Workgroup or Domain: XXXXX
Name: XXXXX
Password: XXXXX

I think the key is, when I initially configured the NAS box for use with my Windows PCs, I didn't bother setting any security -- I just wanted to turn the machines on and not have to enter usernames and passwords.

From what I gather -- and please tell me if I'm correct -- OS X requires a certain minimum level of security, whereas I was able to get away with not implementing any when I was only using Windows.

So, the other day I went back and reconfigured the NAS box and set it up with a username and password. And now it works.

Does this make sense to you Mac folks? Did I do it right?

The one thing that's still an issue is that every time I restart my Mac, I have to re-connect to this server, and type in the workgroup/name/password combination again. Isn't this info supposed to be saved on a keychain, or something like that, so I don't have to?