Mac or PC?
- Thread starter FaceYourNemesis
- Start date
I know that Windows networking on anything other than "Pro" editions is pants, beyond that I don't see any issues.
My problems have been trying to get Macs and PCs to see each other (I think the PC could see the Mac and other PCs could see the Pc, but the Mac couldn't see anything) and hooking up to Wifi with a MacBook thing. It could see the Wifi, it could connect to the Wifi but it wouldn't communicate. Sadly, I have no idea how to find out what the IP settings are that are assigned to a Mac, so I couldn't see if it was getting an IP assigned, if the gateway was wrong, if there was a fault with keys, nothing. Just "You are connected" and "Everything is fine, if it's not working, try seeing if your Internet is down or the site, because I'm a Mac and couldn't possibly ever have any kind of issue at all, it's somebody else's problem". That Mac NEVER worked on the network, yet three XP laptops, a Wii, iPhone and PS3 never had the slightest issue. One of the laptops was used in place of the Mac, as not connecting to the network made it useless. Actually, it was useless anyway, complete dog of a machine :lol:
Of course, that's just my poor experience and shouldn't be taken as canon. People only get in touch with me when things don't work, so I'm only ever going to see broken or stubborn Macs :lol:
Actually, I have a few XP laptops that are swines when it comes to wifi. They'll connect and not communicate, or they'll just suddenly stop for no reason. I've found that some of the additional Wifi driver systems are dreadful and really cause issues (the built in XP one seems much better). Most of the time our Wifi router needs a reboot, but sometimes, XP needs a complete reboot to get it to connect up. So it's not just Macs, I don't want to give that impression
It's just that when it breaks on a PC, I know where the fault lies because I can fault find and dig out where it's failing. I don't know how to do it on a Mac, which is why I said I think often it's a case of just not having the experience or knowledge.
My problems have been trying to get Macs and PCs to see each other (I think the PC could see the Mac and other PCs could see the Pc, but the Mac couldn't see anything) and hooking up to Wifi with a MacBook thing. It could see the Wifi, it could connect to the Wifi but it wouldn't communicate. Sadly, I have no idea how to find out what the IP settings are that are assigned to a Mac, so I couldn't see if it was getting an IP assigned, if the gateway was wrong, if there was a fault with keys, nothing. Just "You are connected" and "Everything is fine, if it's not working, try seeing if your Internet is down or the site, because I'm a Mac and couldn't possibly ever have any kind of issue at all, it's somebody else's problem". That Mac NEVER worked on the network, yet three XP laptops, a Wii, iPhone and PS3 never had the slightest issue. One of the laptops was used in place of the Mac, as not connecting to the network made it useless. Actually, it was useless anyway, complete dog of a machine :lol:
Of course, that's just my poor experience and shouldn't be taken as canon. People only get in touch with me when things don't work, so I'm only ever going to see broken or stubborn Macs :lol:
Actually, I have a few XP laptops that are swines when it comes to wifi. They'll connect and not communicate, or they'll just suddenly stop for no reason. I've found that some of the additional Wifi driver systems are dreadful and really cause issues (the built in XP one seems much better). Most of the time our Wifi router needs a reboot, but sometimes, XP needs a complete reboot to get it to connect up. So it's not just Macs, I don't want to give that impression
It's just that when it breaks on a PC, I know where the fault lies because I can fault find and dig out where it's failing. I don't know how to do it on a Mac, which is why I said I think often it's a case of just not having the experience or knowledge.
walker1104
Mega Poster
Hixee said:
Summed it up perfectly for me there Hixee. I don't see the point in paying all that money for a Mac, when the equivilent PC would be much faster. I'm not a big fan of Windows 7 though, I still run XP on my computers, except the laptop, as that came with 7 on it and I can't be arsed to format and install XP.
MouseAT
Hyper Poster
The easiest way to do that is with the terminal. OS X is still Unix underneath the hood, so good old ifconfig works wonders.furie said:
You obviously had better luck than we did. Maybe you’re using older machines than we had. We had far more problems with the summer 2010 iMacs than we did with the older models. In any case, to get everything to work reliably we had to:marc said:
- Disable IPV6. Try a stock Server 2008 R2 install with AD, DHCP and DNS, then try to bind a mac to it with IPV6 enabled on both machines. It’ll bork. Badly.
- Change the machine password interval so that the Macs don’t unilaterally change their AD machine password and cause authentication failures.
- Increase the value of MDNS_timeout so that the machines can actually see AD reliably.
- Set the DNS search domains manually so that the Macs can actually find machines in DNS.
- Change the Auto Mount Timeout value in /etc/autofs.conf so that when a user logs off, other users aren’t blocked from logging on if their network user space is on a share that the previous user was using.
- Disable TCP delayed acknowledgement so that you can actually browse SMB shares without dying of old age before the Mac displays the contents of shared folders. Ironically, this wasn’t a problem before Snow Leopard.
- Find a way to give users easy access to the contents of their network user space. Apple seem to expect users to either drill all the way down from the top level share or synchronize their entire user space every time they log on to a machine. Not exactly practical for your typical art or media student. I ended up writing a shell script to extract the path to the user’s home directory from Active Directory, then delete the user’s local documents/music/movies/downloads/pictures folders and replace them all with symlinks. It works really well, but damn it was a pain in the arse.
In fact, that last point pretty much sums up my entire experience with Macs in an enterprise environment. You can make them work, and the ones I work with work really really well now – but it took a hell of a lot of work to achieve what (on the windows side at least) should be really straightforward.
Oh and the whole Mac concept of "copying a folder over another folder deletes everything in the folder you're overwriting without even sending it to the trash" is a disaster waiting to happen. I could hardly believe it the other day when I discovered that if you want to merge together the contents of two folders, you either need to resort to the terminal or use a third party application.
That’s not to say I’m a Windows fanboy either. This afternoon my Windows 7 box at work decided that double clicking on a file or folder should display the properties dialog box, not open the file or folder in question. Nothing a reboot couldn’t fix, but weird all the same.
MouseAT said:
Yeah, I don't do 'nix :lol: As I say, it's experience and I wouldn't even know where to find the terminal on a Mac. If I did, you shouldn't have to. I can find out what IP settings my PC has without using a command line. I can find out roughly where the issue is. That was really my issue. It's "everything is fine, nothing can ever be wrong - if it is wrong, you do actually need to have done a degree in computing to fix even the simplest issue, but that's nothing to do with Apple because we make everything so it just works. Lalalalalaaaaa"
FaceYourNemesis
Hyper Poster
OS X is a certified Unix system, but Apple still seem to do their own thing, e.g. using launchd instead of cron.
You could just download BSD with a KDE aqua clone, and be done with it :wink:
You could just download BSD with a KDE aqua clone, and be done with it :wink:
dropthefloor93
Hyper Poster
Computers: PC
everything else: Mac
everything else: Mac
tomahawk
Strata Poster
I still have my soul, therefore I have a PC.
Apple is overpriced and more of a trendy thing to have. The people I know who had macs growing up, were the kids whose parents bought them Lexus' and BMW's for their 16 birthday, and then traded it in for something better when they turned 17. iPods are highly overrated, iPad is simply a tablet, and the iPhone gets **** on by droids.
I had a Zune, I have a windows phone (with a Zune built in) I have now had 2 PC laptops, and will probably get a third soon since my hard drive is failing. For what it will cost for my 3 PC's I would be able to get a mid level mac. For everyone who says mac's don't have issues? Tell that to the several people I know who had their hard drive crash with no warning, or the issues of getting programs. You can buy all the software you want for a PC that a Mac has and better if you really want.
My only issue with PC is with my phone and the small marketplace it has as of now, but, I got my phone with the launch of windows phone's so I should expect that.
The logo for Mac is the fall of man. Funny stuff.
Apple is overpriced and more of a trendy thing to have. The people I know who had macs growing up, were the kids whose parents bought them Lexus' and BMW's for their 16 birthday, and then traded it in for something better when they turned 17. iPods are highly overrated, iPad is simply a tablet, and the iPhone gets **** on by droids.
I had a Zune, I have a windows phone (with a Zune built in) I have now had 2 PC laptops, and will probably get a third soon since my hard drive is failing. For what it will cost for my 3 PC's I would be able to get a mid level mac. For everyone who says mac's don't have issues? Tell that to the several people I know who had their hard drive crash with no warning, or the issues of getting programs. You can buy all the software you want for a PC that a Mac has and better if you really want.
My only issue with PC is with my phone and the small marketplace it has as of now, but, I got my phone with the launch of windows phone's so I should expect that.
The logo for Mac is the fall of man. Funny stuff.