Today was my first day at work with the new MacBook. Going in to today, I had several concerns on my mind, but after a little bit of work, and some patience, I was able to connect to all of the essential corporate resources. Here is a break down of the concerns I faced going in, the actual issues I ran in to, and what I did to work around them.
Connecting to the Exchange Server Result:Success I knew that this would be pretty much hit or miss. I have heard both negative, and positive reactions with respect to connecting MS Entourage to a corporate MS Exchange server.
Configuration: Set up a new Exchange account, configured it to
point to the corporate Exchange server. Hit send/receive. Done. All
of my mail, meetings, contacts, filters, and folders were instantly
downloaded. Connecting to NFS Mounts Result:Success Originally, I
tried to mount the NFS shares via SMB using the following command:
mount -t smbfs -o username=user //server/share /mnt/mymount/ : No
Good. It said that the smbfs does not support the “-o” option.
Doesn’t support the “-o” option? Then how am I supposed to pass my
username? After some minor searching on Apple’s site, turns out
that Apple was nice enough to provide us with a specific command
for this task called mount_smbfs.
After reviewing the Man page I came up with the following command
mount_smbfs -Uusername //server/share ~/mnt/mymount. After
executing the command, I was prompted for my password. I entered my
password, and then the mount point was active.
Connecting to Network Printers Result:Success I haven’t tried to connect to my network printer at home yet, so I had no idea if I would be able to connect to the printer at work. I went in to the print and fax settings. Clicked on the ‘+’ to add a printer. First I selected an IP Printer. Then I was asked to choose between a HP Jet Direct or LPD protocol. First I chose, HP Direct, since the printer I was trying to connect to was an HP printer. No Luck. When I tried to print it said that the printer was busy even though it said Idle under the status icon. So I went back and tried the LPD protocol. For the Address, I gave the Printer Server, for the Queue, I gave it the printer name. I then selected the type of HP printer that it is from the list. I tried to print again. Success.
To be honest, it was quite un-eventfull. After hearing so many people speak about how difficult it is to integrate a Mac in to a corporate environment, it just seemed so easy to me. Of course there are a few more issues that I have to work out, but overall, I am good to go.