USB Ehternet Vs. Integrated Ethernet

Hi all

I am fairly new to Mac having only owned mine for nearly 2 years, and whilst i do use it a fair bit, i am still using MS W*****s.

I work for a well known television company which has deployed Macs to certain areas of the business, and surprisingly, i have come across something that has intrigued me.

We have 2 MacBook Pros that are connected to the domain via the ethernet port. We seem to have very little bother with these, however, there are 3 MacBook Airs connecting via USB Ethernet dongles, and we seem to have no end of bother with them connecting to shares on our network. The connection seems to drop off and when you do a CMD+K, it brings up the box, the entry is there for the share, but it wont connect. The user has to reboot the MacAir to get connectivity again. I have suggested they 'eject' from the share in Finder when they take it out of the office, however this seems to not really be a an answer.

I have (probably quite incorrectly) thought that because the MacBook Pro's work fine but the Airs are a little flakey, could it be to do with the way the devices connect? Is there any known issues with USB Ethernet dongles

Sorry if any of my terminology is wrong, and i apologise if there is a very simple answer, but i have looked and cannot seem to find an answer.

Thanks

Lee

The USB Ethernet dongle is potentially going to provide less bandwidth than the straight Ethernet cable, but that should be noticeable only when it's being actively used to copy files back and forth. For most common browsing, it should be perfectly fine..

The dongle, however, shouldn't interfere with access/connecting to shares. If you have WiFi available, can you use that on the MBA's to see if they will reliably connect to the shares?

How are the MBA's connecting to the shares? SMB? NFS? AFP?

And for what it is worth never had much success with dongles. And stick with Word as it is still; the best suite going.

I would suggest getting one of the Thunderbolt to gigabit ethernet adapters and try that vs the USB adapters.

Raz0rEdge said:

How are the MBA's connecting to the shares? SMB? NFS? AFP?

Click to expand...

RAZ0R - They are connecting vis SMB. The shares are on a Win 2008 R2 server. Access to a network such as ours via Wifi is a no-no in my book. Just very security concious