h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Where I work is looking at getting a mac for testing can any of you people out there give me some pointers to online information on integrating modern macs (ie OSX) into networked life. We've got a novell network and a linux network and it'll end up having to work with one or both of those.
If this works we might be getting a lot more for teching purposes.

Thanks
Phil

There are lots of good general Mac help sites, but I can't think of one off the top of my head that covers those issues specifically.

You might find you don't need one though - if you can't figure out the Mac's gui interface (which with OS X 10.3 is simple enough), you can just use the *nix commands - the gui in most cases is just a candy coating to the *nix commands anyway - MacOS X is using samba, nfs, ftp etc. to do its file sharing. There is also a "Go" menu in the Finder, you can use that to get direct access to network resources by typing in a URL of sorts - "smb://hostname.edu" for a samba connection, "afp://hostname.edu" for AppleShare, and of course "ftp://hostname.edu" for ftp connections, "nfs://" etc, you get the picture.

I'm just on a quest for a bit of info before the box turns up (be a while as the request for quote has just gone in today). If getting at the *nix stuff under the hood is easy enough then it shouldn't be too much of a problem

As long as your network has DHCP server running, your new mac will try and join the network automatically the first time you plug in the ethernet cable. You can then connect to other machines using the Finder's "Connect to Server" menu item. It works with any Windows 2000 + server, or any machine running SAMBA as d'Elephant says.

B.

Getting at the BSD layer is as easy as starting up Terminal, which you will find in the "Utilities" folder inside the "Applications" folder (or in other words, in /Applications/Utilities )

You can also hold down command-s during startup to enter single-user mode, which bypasses the gui altogether (any *nix novices who should happen to read this and give it a try, type "/sbin/shutdown -r now" to get back to normal Mac behavior).

I'm looking forward to getting hold of one to play with