OS X Server 10.4.7 and OS 9 client issues?

[Dreimiller]

My wife just started a job at a local elementary school assisting the teachers who bring their class to the computer lab. Over the summer the school upgraded their server from OS 9 to OS X 10.4. This was apparently done because the teachers with Windows laptops wanted to be able to connect to the server. My wife says that they are experiencing extreme slowness when the kids attempt to log (each student has their own account) on from their OS 9 computers (iMac G3s) and reports of AppleWorks being very slow (even though it is running locally on each Mac).

It could be that something simple that they’ve missed. My wife mentioned that the woman who provides the tech support for her lab and is in charge of the server was not familiar with a technical book publisher named O’Reilly. Doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that they have things properly configured, but there is another person in charge of the computer systems for the entire town so perhaps they were involved in setting up the server and maybe they do know what they are doing.

I’m no server expert but my wife volunteered to check with me to see if I had any ideas. She is going to try to get us into the school on Sunday so that I can see first hand how things are set up. Are there any known issues between OS 9 Macs and an OS X 10.4 server or any common set-up mistakes that might cause the behaviors that they are experiencing?

[Dreimiller]

I take the lack of responses to mean that there are no known issues or msiconfigurations that would cause slow network access between OS 9 Macs and an OS X server. My trip to check out the problem was delayed until this coming Sunday so I still have no first-hand info to work with, but my wife reports that the slowness is driving everyone at the school nuts.

I know that AppleWorks will slow down dramaatically if there are too many “Recent Items” aliases but I haven’t heard of any network problems that would cause a similar problem in AppleWorks where it preoccupies itself with network activity so much so that any attempt to actually use it becomes impossible (which is what’s happening).

[Author]

Posts