Roberto

First thing, Using POP3 to deliver Email to another server is a crutch to support very small businesses or poorly chosen internet packages. It's a compromise and under some circumstances it WILL produce unpredictable results. As such Microsoft themselves only support it in Small Business Server, their 'compromise for small business' product, which is actually a very good product. I'm a little surprised that you're not using SBS for 6 users. It's cheaper, and easier to set up and administer, than the full versions of the products. As for setting up Exchange in school, In a way this might actually be easier, as you're not going to be trying to shoe-horn it into a small business setup. However, Exchange is a very involved product and I really would suggest either attending a course prior to setting it up, or getting some help to do so.

That's because it isn't there. The poster you refer to on channel 9 was probably Posting While Intoxicated , or confused by some of the odd bundles Microsoft disks come in for MSDN or Select; There is a product SKU for Exchange that ships in Select that includes the Outlook client and this is branded as both part of Office and of Exchange, for example.

Ok, if you can't mount the drive from Finder normally then you most certainly need to check SMB signing as your next stage. You don't want to turn off SMB signing totally, what you should do is put SMB signing settings into the hands of the connecting client, so that the most secure mode that the client supports is what the server will use. Good guide on that here: MacOSXhints

Quite a fair bit of server is immature, shall we say, especially if you try to administer it via the GUI tools. I've basically divided my work on server into "bits I know work" and "here be dragons". Now this - in my experience - is very unusual. The only time I've seen an OS X client machine hang like this, it was due to hardware issues. Not to suggest your experiences are any less valid of course.

Or even for technical ones. Of course not. There isn't anything in any platform (assuming we're talking about general use and not esoteric stuff) that you can't get on another platform. I'm a damn sight more productive using a Mac & Windows than I would be / was when just using either one by itself. Actually they've got a fair point. ACLs are new to Tiger (IIRC) and either way, Apple could have done a much better job if they'd forced their coders to work with crayon while wearing boxing gloves. All software and hardware sucks, it's just a question of degree. All software and hardware has skeletons in the cupboard, it's simply a matter of whether or not the way you use the system makes you encounter them too often.

looking on at the rest of the thread I don't think this is a real issue but for the record, to run netboot over a subnetted network, the simplest way to do it is to configure the router(s) to include the list of netboot server IP addresses in the list of DHCP servers, and I believe also to allow multicast traffic through. That's all you need to do, and is by far the easiest and most robust method of doing things if you have access to the router config. The hints on Mike's site are really only a fallback position if you cannot modify the router config, I think he mentions that himself. Best Mac Admin Site Ever I have to say!

Are you using an Apple Server? I think you are yes? This is certainly do-able to the point where Apple have added specific settings to the workstation admin tool in server to set this up (look under 'sharing' IIRC). I assume it's just creating a symbolic link to a afp mountpoint on the server at this time. Not a bad idea. This could work quite nicely I would have thought. I'd want to test it a lot to be sure, and one thing that springs to mind is - are you happy for your mac workstations to be unavailable or at least unpredictable if their home server is offline for any reason. That's the immediate downside that I can see to this way of doing things, and it could be a big problem or it could be no problem at all.

Presumably the home folders are on a SMB share on a Windows Server? Is the path to each user's home share defined in AD? It needs to be. What happens if you open Finder / Go / Connect to Server and try to mount the share manually, using the format smb://{the exact path to server as specified in the AD account}/sharename for example smb://mywindowsserver.robertmoir.com/robertm$

ask/pick away!

Broc, You probably want to go to my website and start reading all the blog posts titled "Basics of integrating modern Macs onto a Windows network" http://robertmoir.com/tags/Computers+-+Cross-Platform+issues/default.aspx?PageIndex=2 there are quite a lot of posts on the subject and they will take you through general discussions of the concepts involved up to an actual howto / FAQ on what buttons to press to actually join a mac to your windows domain. Regards Rob

Thanks for the reply beeswax. I'm looking for new, ITIL compliant helpdesk software, which means it has to seperate out incident management and problem management, sounds like Libreum doesn't do this, so the search continues.

Tablets ARE good at the things they're useful for. Which isn't sitting around being "good". Kinda like any tool really, if you need one then get one and use it in good health, if you're getting one to impress other people or to keep up with the jonses then you'll regret it.

Is Liberum helpdesk able to seperate out incidents and problems, and show the relationship between them properly? Can it show the workaround to a helpdesk technician for a known problem, when they create a incident ticket and they / the system links it to a problem?

I'd suggest that the best qualified and experienced person be the "IT Systems Manager" or whatever, with a "Senior Technician" and a "Technician". Now this would put a few noses out of joint, one person will feel like they've been demoted, and you have to consider what level of person you're hoping to attract for the *new* senior technician role. None the less, I would say that this issue has to be corrected sooner or later. As for the SMT, perhaps there is something on the BECTA website on building a ICT support team that might help them learn how to structure the department? Or maybe an independant consultancy from a human resources type company or a larger school or college who they might trust to talk to them on best practices here?

Hold on, you've got 2 people at the moment who are both "managers" and you're appointing a 3rd one who will be a "Senior ICT technician"? Who or what will they be senior to? I'd have said that either of the current managerial job titles would be fine for a "head of the IT support department" role, but if you're planning to have 3 people where the lowest ranked guy is still a "Senior ICT technician" then perhaps the whole department should be reviewed and restructured. Sorry, probably not what you wanted / expected to hear, but if I was interviewing for that post based on the job title, then heard i'd be the lowest ranked guy out of a team of 3, with two "managers" above me, I'd assume you were all insane and walk out of the interview as soon as I could politely do so.

We run our media labs on macs, using Final Cut Pro. We looked at lots of different PC based packages but none of them really cut it with us. The attitude amoung our media teachers and technicians is that anyone who thinks a PC solution is a good idea obviously hasn't been properly shown what Final Cut Pro can do. I'm not qualified to judge the relative merits of the different editing software, but I will say that there is a very low support burden on my department based on their current solution, with every camera and what have you that they plug into the macs simply working without any problems or support calls. Whatever platform you choose, I second the post about not editing over the network, you'll want your resources local during the composition part of the project, even if you plan to save the results back to the network once you are finished.

Depending on what kinds of admin tasks / package deployments you need to do, and how comfortable you are with the UNIX cli, the easiest way to quickly drop a package onto a machine over the network may be to connect via SSH and install it from the command line.

Get some RM ones. That'll soon show folks the error of their ways.

"Is there any way of allowing the NT4 Users to be able to use the Exchange Server" I assume you're talking about a seperate Windows NT 4 domain? Long Answer: "Exchange 2003 requires its users to have Active Directory accounts homed in a domain in the same forest as Exchange 2003 itself." Short Answer: "No." You could, of course, give them accounts on the Windows 2003 network and let them use Outlook Web Access to talk to their mailbox.

Hi Ant, To integrate mac clients into a Windows network at a simple (but still very usuable and useful) level, you can do this very simply in 10.4 and the later versions of 10.3 without any 3rd party software or a Mac OSX server. On the mac clients, look at /applications/utilities/Directory Access - under "Services" tab, open Active Directory and configure a binding to AD from here, hopefully it should be fairly self explanatory. - on the Directory Access "Authentication" tab, ensure "Custom Path" is configured under Search, and that Active Directory appears on the list underneath it. - Click Apply. - You should be done. On the Windows Server (I'm assuming we're talking a Domain here), open group policy in Active Directory Users & Computers, and configure the default domain policy and/or the default domain controllers policy Computer Configuration/Windows Settings/Security Options/Microsoft Network Server: Digitally Sign communications (always) is set to DISABLED. (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823659) That should just about do it. Regards Rob