I've been using a Mac PowerBook now for about 6 months. I love most things about it. The one thing that consistently frustrates me, however, is the ability to integrate stand-alone Macs into Windows networks. And, as one might expect, Microsoft and Apple point the finger at one another saying the other is to blame. I've had various levels of success getting my Mac to talk to a Windows Active Directory. Printing works great, domain login works great, resource enumeration works great (most of the time), but that's where it turns ugly. Accessing Windows file shares is essentially a hit or miss proposition. If you've got administrative access to the network and you're able to map an administrative share to a server (C$ on a remote resource, for example) this will generally work well. But....how many of your users have administrative access? The answer to that should be a VERY low number. Accessing conventional Windows shares is problematic. I can generally map the share, view volume contents, and even open files to which I have access. The problem comes when you try to save or copy files to the share. I've seen at least a half dozen strange and inconsistent error messages that all end with the same result.....a 0KB file "ghost" on the share. I've literally spent about 12 hours in total researching and attempting to employ various fixes to the problem with mixed results. Today, I downloaded a product from Thursby software called "DAVE". It has promise. It immediately fixed some of the major problems I was having with file transfers and saving to shares, but it seems to have broken some networking functionality that was working. I'm going to continue to evaluate this product and I'll let you know how it goes.

Apple, for reasons unknown to me, elected to remove NetInfo Manager from OS X Leopard. I used to use this tool to map computer netbios names to private IP addresses because I work from multiple offices (on different subnets) with VMWare images of Windows 2003 servers used for development. Fortunately, there is a fairly simple workaround that works pretty well and very much like the LMHOSTS method utilized in the Windows environment. There are a couple of tricks to get it to work, however, because you're working with system level files that are hidden by the OS. First, select "Go To Folder..." from the "Go" menu in Finder. Enter "/private" in the dialog box and click "Go". Find the "etc" folder, right-click it and select "Get Info". At the bottom of the Info screen is a small lock icon. Click the lock and enter your password (this assumes that the user ID you're logged in with has administrative privileges on the system). Enter your password when prompted and click "OK". Click the + symbol at the bottom of the Info screen and select your user name from the "User or Group" dialog box. Once you have your name added, make sure that you have Read and Write access to the etc folder. Open the etc folder and repeat these steps for the "hosts" file. Open the hosts file and create an IP mapping to the server you want to resolve. You'll first enter the system's IP address, hit the Tab key, then type the name you want to be resolved. Save the file and you're good to go. I created an Alias to the hosts file and keep it in my Dock for quick access. You can place several entries to the same netbios name in this file and comment them out (using a single "#" sign) or uncomment them as necessary to accommodate different networks. As per usual, be very careful working with hidden system files as you can render your system unbootable if you screw something up.