I have several users with Macs who are now complaining they can’t see any of the shares they used to. I verified that Macintosh Service is installed and running on the server in question. I haven’t been able to find any of the admin tools for the Mac Service to do any troubleshooting. Is there something else I need to install ?
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The first thing to check is the switches you’re using on the network. If they are Layer 2 devices, there may not be much you can do with/for them. A restarting of the switches might resolve the problem. If they are Layer 3 devices, make sure they have been configured to route AppleTalk traffic between the subnets where the servers are and where the Mac clients are.
As much as the admin interface on Windows 2000/2003 has improved over the NT 4 days, the tools for the Mac service have received little to no attention by comparison. The first thing to do is right click on the My Computer icon and click on Manage. Go down to the bottom of the screen and look for Services and Applications. Under that you will find Routing and Remote Access. Under that you will see AppleTalk Routing. Here is where you will configure the network card on the server. AppleTalk protocol will automatically be installed at that point.
From that same app, if you scroll up a bit you will see the Shared Folders area under System Tools. As you scroll through this, you will see all the shares currently set up on the server. For the Mac users to see the shares, you will need to establish a Mac share for the directory they want to use in addition to the Windows share that may already be in place. Right click on the Shared Folders icon and select New Share. Make sure the Apple Macintosh box is checked. Once you have entered the path and the share name, the share should be visible from the Mac.
Another thing you may need to do is to disable cleartext passwords on the server running the Mac Service. Right click on the Shared Folders icon and select Configure File Server for Macintosh. You can make the desired change here. If you need more details than what I have been able to give here, the best reference I have found for walking you through this is here.
