Not a switcher

More of a "forced to support Macs b/c there's no one else" but I still have some issues I could use some help with. We're really understaffed (2 of us for about 150 users, not counting equipment) so any help would be appreciated.

VPN connections on my laptops are slow and unreliable. Also, Netscreen's Nfuse won't work on the Mac, but I don't think I can do anything about that.

Installing a network printer. On my pcs, I browse to my print server, double click the printer I want and I'm done. Is there a way to do that on a Mac?

Entourage is a joke, especially when the user also has a Blackberry connected to my BES. Any alternatives?

I'm setting up shortcuts to a webpage for my users to check their spam. On the pc's I get a prompt about the certificate, click install and they're ready to go, but I don't get that with Safari.

Permissions. I learned the hard way that I can't just right click a folder, change the permissions and then push the changes down to the subfolders, but even when I use Workgroup Manager I come across times where a user ends up as the owner of a file instead of the Admin and then nobody else can modify it. How do I avoid this?

"Unexpectedly quit b/c of an unknown error" used to make me want to put my fist through a monitor before I learned about a way to use Terminal to get more useful information after a crash, but is there anything more like Windows Event Viewer that I can use?

Any help would be appreciated. Hopefully I'll get to hire someone who's into Macs and I can pass them over, but until then I'm stuck.

Hi stevenyc, I can't answer all of your questions, but I can help with some:

1/ Installing network printers. If your printer is of a recent model, it will support Apple's Bonjour protocol - configuration free networking. The printer advertizes it's presence and the Mac will automatically see it. Setup is fast and hassle free. Google "Bonjour for Windows" and "Bonjour for Mac" to see all the details. I just set up a printer on my Mac and had a Windows PC on the same network sharing it within about 5 minutes.

2/ Entourage isn't Outlook I agree. Happily, the open source world has provided Evolution:

see: http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution

Setup is less than simple unfortunately. You will need to install Apple X11, then Darwinports. Then you can use DarwinPorts to install Evolution. Evolution is the nearest thing to Outlook I have seen on the open market, and it works directly with Exchange servers.

3/ Permissions: I am not sure what the application is that would have you needing to directly muck with permissions, but your best bet may be good ol' Terminal.app, the Mac OS X command line. The unix standard "chown" and "chmod" commands both support a "R" (recursive) switch that will allow them to traverse down the full tree of the starting diretory, applying the changes you request.

For more complicated commands without a "R" switch, check out my "walk" utility, from: http://www.campbell-tx.net/campbellware/macosx.html. This command "walks down" the directory hierarchy starting at the directory you were in when you issued the command, executing a supplied command at each level. So, for example:

would traverse the directory hierarchy starting at your current dir (the "." part of the command, and execute the command "chown ugo-w *.jpg" at each level. In this case, this would make all JPG files non writable. The possiblities are endless with this command.

By the way, the name is derived from an old iRMX86 HI command that did a similar thing. Anyone here old enough to remember iRMX86? :dive:

Hope this helps at least a bit.

I work in an environment where the users have just started all buying macs aswell and its a bit overwhelming at first!

Here is a link to my uni's VPN instructions see if any of it looks imilar to your set up, there is a section for macs http://www.ucs.ed.ac.uk/nsd/access/vpnclients.html

I tend to justs et up the printing using IP printing as its easy to set up and works fine.

Entourage is a joke

We also have our own security certificates for certain things but i dont think theyd be any use to you.

Here are two other groupware solutions for Mac, rather like Outlook/Exchange. One of them (Daylite) just provides the non email part of it, using Mail for the email - the other (Zimbra) looks completely self contained.

The references are:

Daylight Groupware: http://www.marketcircle.com/google/MC_groupware_G.html?from=adwords&interest=groupware

Zimbra Groupware: http://www.zimbra.com/products/

These are both native Mac apps (nice additions to the X11 based Evolution).

Thanks! You've all given me a lot to digest.