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?
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?