IT Admin Stuff

On occasion, I'll take on a gig that's a wee bit technical and obscure. Why?

Does it have something to do with a childhood spent making Transformers from Lego? Or that Commodore 64 that my brother would spend hours typing the code for Lode Runner onto cassette tape? Must be that, yeah. Forever wondering how I lost my hard drive on good ol' 486 keeps me hungry too.

A short while back, I came face to face once again with that wonder. Ok, I exaggerate. The drama was nothing like ol' 486.

Picture this:

• Small Mac-PC network
  
• File Server is on Windows XP Pro - no server OS here
  
• Each Mac & PC is configured to mount multiple network shares at startup
  

Depending on the day, one or more workstation would not be able to mount all their shares. The Macs would complain of -36 errors. Aliases to the network shares were "missing" (or words to that effect). PCs too would sometimes complain of not being able to mount the drives.

This was a head scratcher for sure. Nothing on the forums had any solutions that worked. Not Macwindows.com. Not MacOSXhints.com. Not Macintouch.com. I was ready to throw in the towel until I looked in the sessions viewer on the WinXP file server.

To make a long story short, here's what I found. I hope no one else has to go through this!!!

• Windows XP Pro only allows 10-11 sessions at once to be opened for file shares. Makes sense. WinXP is not a Server OS and this is well documented.
  
• When the PC workstations mount all the drives, they do it in a single session - just like they should.
  
• When MacOSX mounts the drives, it mounts each drive in a different session. Why Steve, why?
  

If even only 2 Macs needed to mount 4 drives each (not uncommon) there'd be nearly nothing left for the other workstations. Why Steve, why?

Simple (but not free) solution: use DAVE. Mounts all the drives in a single session. Why can't you do this with your Samba client Steve? Even if we had a server-OS, why should be buy extra licenses just for your idiotic CIFS/SMB implementation?