XRAID to store both Mac and Windows Home Dir's. is it possible?

[ranj]

Hi

 

We got a dilemma in the school I currently work in and was hoping for some help.

 

We currently have 2 networks in our school, a Windows and MAC network. We have 50 Macs which are on their own Open Directory Network and this is connected to an Xserve and XRAID running 10.4.11. The Mac clients are Intel and run 10.4.8.

 

It's become difficult to manage 2 networks and initially when it was setup we tried to integrate the macs on the Active directory network so pupils would have one login but the storage area for Macs would point to the XRAID storage and not windows storage. We never managed to get this working but would like to revisit this if it can possible to do what I propose.

 

I would like all pupils to have one home folder and in this home folder I would like them to see both their windows and Mac files. All storage would be held on the XRAID rather than a windows file server/Nas Box and was wondering if this is possible?

 

Is it possible if a windows client logs in and wants access to a shared or home directory, can this be situated on a XRaid and also if a mac user logs in to a mac with an AD account, can they also see the same storage with a mix of windows files in their home directory?

 

I know they are issues with resource forks and possible corruption by mixing the two file systems but has this been address in 10.5 leopard?

 

If this solution cannot work, is there an alternative way that this could be done? we have have a SNAP server which has a huge amount of storage and can talk via afp, smb, nfs, ftp etc.

 

SO far I have managed to get the XRAID to be seen by our windows server and we can browse files on the storage and the Xserve is binded to our active directory server but if I try to change security permissions on the XRAID through windows it doesnt like it and I am not able to change any security as it seems it can only see users/groups which are the Mac side only. Even if i become an owner I just gets lots of access is denied messages.

 

Many thanks

[iSteve]

You can do this, it's what we do. Your Mac Server which the XServe RAID is connected to is probably sharing the home folders out over AFP, if you switch on Windows sharing in Server Admin you can connect by \\your-server\your-home-share from a Windows box, stick this path in your AD or whatever.