Surprising Success on a PC network

[Les Posen]

I write a monthly tech column for my national psychological society's 
magazine.

Usually, I email my copy to the editor, but today I took advantage of 
being in the same building as my national HQ for another meeting, and 
decided to visit and attempt to log-on to the intranet and post my 
article from there.

I was shown the President's office where I completed the column, but 
needed to access the internet to accurately source some URLs I had 
referred to in my article.

I was introduced to the newly appointed IT co-ordinator who proceeded 
to tell me that it was hard enough to hook up Windows laptops to the 
society's intranet, much less a Mac laptop.

Perhaps I had a dial-up account I could use, he suggested, pointing to 
a spare RJ-11 jack sitting on the table.

I suggested we try to use the ethernet cable sitting nearby, whereby I 
got a small lecture on Netware, thin clients, special software, network 
settings, blah blah......

Nice, I suggested, but humour me, let's just connect the ethernet cord, 
and see what happens. I wanted him to stick around in case I needed 
some password.

He grabs the ethernet cable, and I point him to the jack at the 
Powerbook's rear, and he looks for a light to come on, probably 
suspecting that the 'book won't recognise the jack. Of course, he 
doesn't know the Powerbook is autosensing and being at the back of the 
Mac a light is pretty useless.

So we plug it in, I head to Network settings, change the connection 
mode from Airport to ethernet, we wait a moment, I hit "apply, and up 
comes all the IP address, submask, and router info.

His eyebrows shoot up. "Ya better check if you can get on the web". 
Safari fires up from the dock ("jees, that's pretty neat!") and we are 
surfing.

I suggest we try and log on to the network itself, so we hit Command-K 
in the Finder, wait for a few moments, and yep, there they all are. we 
click on one of them, he enters a username and password in the SMB 
dialogue box and there are all the files.

To say this guy was blown away is an understatement. I get the usual 
defensive stance of "not as much software for the Mac, hard to get 
support for the Mac, there are no Mac servers (which I quickly correct 
pointing out favourable Apple server software license terms), and he 
has no choice but to say thanks for the lesson....hey, anytime! I Ccd 
him my article (it was on backup strategies for PCs and Macs).

So now there is at least one more IT admin guy who knows a tad more 
about Macs than there was yesterday.

Les