Access to DFS Network Shares painful with OSX Lion. Any workarounds?

I'm a fairly new Mac user (6 months or so) and I was given a MacBook Air by my company to help support VPN connections for our growing Mac base. I am very impressed with this Mac so far. It's better in almost every way than a comparative Win7 laptop. The one thing that drives me crazy about the Mac is access files on our network.

We are a heavy Windows shop and I'm pretty sure we are using MS DFS with Active Directory to get to file shares. Even though we use Windows DFS the majority of our files are on either Unix servers or network filer's (also Unix based).
The first thing I noticed is lack of support for UNC file shares. When folks e-mail a link around it looks like this \\server\share\folder\file.doc. When you click on the link the Mac *****es. To get around it you can right-click and do a "Get Internal Selection". This pauses for awhile and eventually brings up the folder the file is in (sometimes). I would love to see Mac support UNC file shares. Honestly, how hard could it be for them to fix that?

The bigger more annoying problem is getting access to file shares across a WAN or VPN connection. I've found the only way to get it work consistently is do a "Connect to Server" in finder. This stalls for awhile, asks me for my password, then brings up the root folder. I then have to click through the folders to finally get to the file that I was looking for. Each folder takes about 30 to 60 seconds to propagate. So we're talking about 5 to 10 minutes to pull up a heavily nested file, which is insanely slow.

Before you blame the WAN I can open up Parallels on the very same machine and pull up the same file share using the UNC link and it takes maybe 30 seconds at most for the application to open and for the very same file to open up for editing. Any ideas to speed things up or am I stuck with using Parallels for this type of thing?

My thoughts,..

As far UNC,...In Apple's eyes it's not broken, why fix it. Should they have drive letters for all their mount points too?

As far as nested files, true, you can map arrive deeper than the actual share whereas on Mac you can only mount the share. But you can drag the deeper folders to the Favorites section of the side bar. Once the share has been mounted, the folders in the sidebar work well.

As for the Connect to Server option (CMD+k), I typically use Automator actions to act as batch files to auto mount the shares I want to access regularly. The script will run, and if desired the credentials can be stored in the keychain so the end user is not asked to authenticate.

DFS is new to Lion as it was not in Snow Leopard. By DFS I assume you mean domainname\sharename e.g. contoso.local\shared vs server01\shared

Although DFS has been around since 2003r2 it's not Apple's job to jump at everything MS comes up with. They did however drop the open source implementation of samba and rewrite their own to work better with Windows 2008 & Win7.

Since OS X came out in 2001 there have been many inroads to working better with MS products. At times is was down right awful. I do however get a chuckle with newer switchers complaining about why Apple can't fix this or that when they have done so much already.

Thanks for the response. I guess it will take some time to figure out how Mac does file shares considering I've been in Windows environments both as a user and professionally for the past 20 years. I'm sure things would work better in a pure Mac environment.

I actually figured that part out with the favorites but it only seems to work with file shares that are on the LAN. With the file shares on the WAN it works about10% of the time. The other times I get the pinwheel and end up having to Force Quit Finder. Now I have about 10 favorites on my bar that don't work and I when I hit them by accident I have to deal with it. Is there a way to remove these favorites? I tried dragging them to the trash can and right-click causes stalls as well.

Automator, eh? I'll have to look into that. Any sites you can point me to?

As far as DFS goes I'm pretty sure it's an Microsoft AD integrated thing as it works amazingly fast with Windows over even slow WAN connections. In our configuration it works like this. \\root\doc\wan ends up mapping to \\servername\sharename\folder. So pretty much every share in our company starts with \\root and all server mounts are mapped to the root DFS folder. In any case I guess I'm asking too much for Apple to take on a Windows standard. I would think it would be in there best interest to get something working. I know that's what keeps folks from being Mac users in our company. We have about 10k employees with only about 200 Mac users. I've personally worked with new Mac users who quickly reverted back to Windows because they couldn't work around these file sharing issues.

Yeah, I'm actually pretty impressed at how well I'm able to do things that I used to do on my Win7 machine. It does help that most apps are going to browser based things. Office for Mac is very useable and I actually prefer it Office for Windows. It seems like it has less features, which means less crap for me to weed through. Too bad no Visio for Mac though. I use Visio all the time. VPN stuff also seems to work smoother than on Windows. Oh, and the Unix terminal blows away MS Command prompt. My only complaint is this file sharing thing. I think I could dump Parallels if I could figure out a good way to get around the file sharing issues. Automator here I come...

Have you look at this?

jescala.com » Blog Archive » Access DFS Shares from Mac OS X

Or ExtremeZ IP?