Macs on a Windows Network...

[Rob.G]

Here at work, I'm one of 3-4 Macs on a Windows network. For the most part it works okay, but there are times when it really pisses me off. One example is how on windows, you can connect to a network drive and make it retain that connection all the time. On the Mac, I find that my network connections will drop randomly, requiring me to reconnect them. I've tried writing a script to automate it but it never works.

One server in particular is really irritating... I'll connect to it, and between the time that I do that and attempt to get to files on it from within my code editor, the connection drops.

I'm wondering if this is a common problem with Macs on Windows networks? If it is, it's something Apple really needs to work on.

 

[Kognito]

MacOS's SMB implementation is pretty woeful. It used to be that Samba was used which was fine, but after Samba changed their licence, Apple decided to build their own SMB client rather than comply with the new licence (which would weaken Apple's patents) and they've never really put the time into it to make it reliable.

Simply put, you're not alone. SMBX (Apple's implementation) sucks.

 

[Rob.G]

Ahhh! That makes sense. Yeah it's pretty terrible. Just this morning I came into work and saw only two of my drives were still connected, so I hit CMD-Z and reconnected to the rest. Half hour later they had all dropped again (except for those same two).

MacOS really has gone downhill since Tim Cook took over.

 

[Kognito]

MacOS really has gone downhill since Tim Cook took over.

People say that all the time on here, but I think in this case it's actually true.

SMBX shipped with Lion I believe, which was around the point at which Tim took over fully and MacOS transitioned from releases every ~2 years, to the annual releases we have now so I'd guess they've just not had the time to dedicate to making it reliable when they've been rushing to implement the bigger headline features.

Discoveryd and APFS are perfect examples of this. Discoveryd replaced mDNSReponder, which was older and open source, but DiscoveryD was so buggy, it ended up being removed and mDNSResponder being put back. APFS is thankfully less buggy but the fact that it still doesn't work on Fusion Drives shows it hasn't seen enough love yet.

 

[Rob.G]

Our iT guy here really hates Macs. It's a small company... 13-ish people, and about 1/3 of us are on Macs. But with each time we have issues, he adds it to his list of reasons to rid the company of Macs. 'Course since the CEO is one of those 1/3, the odds of it happening are fairly slim, at least anytime soon. Still, it's frustrating.

He likes to point out that I RDP into windows machine to do some of my work, like for example I have to have my code editor on a Windows box in order to do some coding since my Mac refuses to talk to it well (the one I referenced in my original post). However, it doesn't help that most of our servers here are ANCIENT.

 

[TriBruin]

How are you authenticating to the Windows Shares? Do you use Active Directory in your work? Are you Macs bound to the AD?

 

[ipponrg]

Our iT guy here really hates Macs. It's a small company... 13-ish people, and about 1/3 of us are on Macs. But with each time we have issues, he adds it to his list of reasons to rid the company of Macs. 'Course since the CEO is one of those 1/3, the odds of it happening are fairly slim, at least anytime soon. Still, it's frustrating.

He likes to point out that I RDP into windows machine to do some of my work, like for example I have to have my code editor on a Windows box in order to do some coding since my Mac refuses to talk to it well (the one I referenced in my original post). However, it doesn't help that most of our servers here are ANCIENT.

Why not consider running Parallels/VirtualBox on your Mac to handle this? I find this usually takes care of all my Windows needs in a Windows environment.