Integrating Macs into Existing Environments

This document is intended to gather together useful links on how to integrate macs into existing infrastructures (esp. those at unc, although hopefully the data will be useful to others as well.

File Systems

One of the tricks to integration is being able to share files. Sure, the mac is pretty well equipped for basic file system connections, but there are things you can do to make it much easier to use with existing infrastructures.

AFS (Andrew File System) is used by a large number of universities, including UNC Chapel Hill. 

SMB/CIFS is the native file sharing system used by Windows. The best site for information on this topic is MacWindows.

NFS is the venerable unix system for sharing files, NFS presents some security issues, but it still in wide use. Apple's got some basic info on mounting NFS shares. See also these tools and guides for NFS and OSX.

Fuse is a relatively new approach, providing a user level file system. One implementation of this is SSHFS, which uses ssh connections to mount remote servers. This is very handy for connecting linux machines and macs. Macfusion is the easiest way to get this on your mac.

Multi-user systems and labs


Last modified: 06 March 2010