Acessing Mac Shares on a Windows Domain

[jmafc]

Hi

 

First of i am complete Mac novice, i have very basic mac knowledge and just wanted to know if this is possible

 

I have just taken over the IT Support of a primary school with has roughly 60+ iOS Devices and a Mac Server

 

We also have around 100+ Student Machines

 

Bascially we have some mac share done by dropbox but i would really like to use the mac server more and host them on there. We have one for iPad and one for iPods

 

What i want to achieve (and know if possible) basically have the same setup as currently. 2 shares which i have setup on the Mac which are mapped via GPO without the need for setting a username and password eg/ they use there standard windows login, as they would on a Windows server. To access and map the share.

 

This works okay for setting the user as macserver\administrator but it runs into issue when trying to map the drives on more than 2 machines

 

The access to the shares on the iOS devices will be done via the File Explorer App

 

The mac is Mavericks and server 3.0

 

 

Cheers

[seawolf]

Do you have a Windows File Server? If so, then just use that with the Macs and either map the drives for the Macs via login scripts (you can't use GPOs to do this for the Macs unless you're using something like Centrify or LikeWise), or purchase an ExtremeZ-IP license for your windows file server and use AFP shares and the Dashboard Zidget to allow users to map their own drives easily and without a login prompt (as long as Kerberos is setup right).

 

For the iOS devices, you could use OwnCloud or purchase MobilEcho which provides fantastic integration with any file servers that can host SMB or AFP shares. It is even able to do "re-hosting" of network shares on multiple servers (e.g. Windows file server, Mac server, and NAS device) from a single host server. It uses standard AD authentication and recognizes existing ACLs for controlling access to shares. It also has built in full editing of MS Office docs without having to open them up in another app, and you can control access using certificates and invitations. Even works great over a VPN.