Hello,

I have a small network (for film production) consisting of one OS X Server and a few clients. Every client workstation has a local media drive, which must be visible to all other clients at exactly the same path on all machines (local and networked). NFS Manager allowed me to export these drives as NFS shares, and then define the shares in the LDAP server, so all machines see the media drives with a minimum of configuration. That part’s golden, works like a charm.

(Aside: An important note is that the network connections are defined centrally on the LDAP server, but take place on a peer to peer basis. Using a re-share is NOT an option, because the Server is running on an oh-so-powerful mac mini, and that in an average day, each workstation will transfer back and forth up to 20GB of data. It’s gotta be direct.)

The problem I am now encountering is trying to use a similar methodology to connect all the workstations to the company’s windows server, over SMB. The windows server obviously already offers an SMB share, but I don’t know how I can go about defining something in the LDAP server to allow the mac workstations to see the windows server automatically (ie. before any login, and without any password, of which there is none required anyway).

I realise I could individually configure each mac to mount the windows server on boot, but I only know how to do this using various startup files locally on the machines. This will soon become untenable, as I am slowly building a render farm, and the PC side of the network is undergoing some changes as well (and I don’t want to have to change everything on 20 machines in the future anytime anything changes; that’s the point of having a server in the first place, isn’t it).

And lastly, I’m good at figuring stuff out, but I’m pretty green with all this server stuff.

Cheers,
Martin