Snow Leopard, fonts, and Windows server

[William Campbell]

Just got my first 10.6 Mac up and running. Looks like Apple changed their scheme for saving resource forks on non-Apple servers. Seeing lots of zero K now that my 10.4 PPC Mac sees fine, both Macs connected via CIFS/SMB. I see at the server, fonts loaded from the 10.6 Mac no longer have "._" hidden resource fork files. I'm a bit late to this party, so maybe this has already been discussed. We held out upgrading as long as we could, then CS5 forced the upgrade (no more support for PPC). So this new Mac is bittersweet--rockin' fast but it doesn't play well with my Windows server (2003 R2).

Anyone walk this road already, and have advice to offer? Thanks.

 

[Joe]

If the fonts were originally copied to the Windows server via AFP and now you are accessing them by SMB you will see this happen. If possible, go back to the source files and copy to the Windows server via SMB. Then accessing them via SMB from Snow Leopard should work.

 

[William Campbell]

Nope, that's not the issue (we know all about that one). I have existing fonts, previously copied via CIFS/SMB from 10.4 Macs to the Win server, and the Snow Leopard machine sees them as zero K. All the 10.4 Macs can access the fonts fine, as it has been for some time, resource forks are saved in a hidden file that prefixes the names with "._" This is well known for some years with Macs and SMB. But now, Snow Leopard has changed the scheme. There is no longer a separate hidden file for resource forks, unless there is an option somewhere to mimic that previous behavior. Somehow, Snow Leopard (in its default config I assume, how we received the machine) is accessing the file streams functionality of NTFS (I guess) because fonts loaded by the Snow Leopard workstation, that work fine from that one Mac only, appear on the Win server as zero K (just as they did with services for mac back in the day of using AppleTalk). It's an either/or situation (as is the earlier problem of AFP versus SMB). Fonts from the 10.6 machine are unreadable by 10.4 Macs and visa-versa. My understanding is that 10.6 has dumped AppleTalk at last (I can't see any option for it) so I wouldn't think that's an issue. However, for the rare (and getting rarer) need for backwards compatibility, the Win server does have SFM installed. I can't imagine it would interfere, but perhaps the newer mac is somehow realizing that and acting different. ??? Who freakin' knows.

I'd expect that someone here has already run up against this problem. Who out there is using Snow Leopard and storing files on a Win server? Don't tell me it "all works fine" for the rest of you. If that's the case, the source of my woes is something else. Others, please chime in.

 

[Joe]

Are you running the latest version which is 10.6.4? There was some SMB fixes and it was only released a couple of weeks ago. Not sure if that will help but that's all I can think of now. Not running 10.6.x in prepress yet here. Because of stuff like this.

 

[William Campbell]

Yep. Went after all that this morning, got 'er all updated. Count yourself lucky (not having these in prep yet). This reminds of the first PowerPC days (and months of anguish), then OSX, Intel, now Snow Leopard. I guess I should have bought a new Mac a little earlier with 10.5 instead. I assume the "non-snow" Leopard doesn't have this problem. Or...? I only upgraded because CS5 won't run on 10.4 or any PPC Mac. Everyone beware--we're all in for some pain as clients upgrade to CS5. Minimum system has to be 10.5.7 and dual-core Intel CPU. Adobe has abandoned PPC from here on out. The price we pay for progress...

If anyone out there is Win serving a combo of Macs running 10.4 and 10.6, please respond. For now my workaround is to zip font folders at a 10.4 Mac and unzip them on my 10.6 Mac. That works, but it sure is extra fuss.

 

[zoran]

I am running Snow Leopard but still have Appletalk.
I upgraded from Leopard on Intel Mac Pro and it looks like it kept Appletalk since I can connect through both AFP and SMB.
Our server is Linux based, old Red Hat 3 on IBM Blade and is running Netatalk (Linux version of Appletalk) and if I connect through AFP, fonts are fine, if I connect through SMB, fonts are corrupt.
This is same behavior I had on Leopard.
My only problem started with Adobe CS5 as for some reason saves files as "invisible" to the server, real pain as I have to save to desktop than copy over.
All other versions of software work fine, even CS4 and Quark so it must be something changed with CS5 and Snow Leopard.

 

[tlindner]

You want to disable "Named Streams" in your SMB client on 10.6. This knowledge base article explains how:

Mac OS X v10.5, v10.6: About named streams on SMB-mounted NAS, Mac OS X, and Windows

With "Named Streams" turned off, your SMB client will revert to the dot underbar files.

 

[William Campbell]

Awesome! My hunch was right -- doing it like SFM does with NTFS file streams. It's cool that Apple added that. Just uncool when you don't know! Thank you thank you, so much. You just cut my upgrade frustration factor in half.

 

[DavidMa]

I'm running 10.4 and 10.6 with a win server and just use the AFP mount, not SMB. Works great.

 

[William Campbell]

I'm running 10.4 and 10.6 with a win server and just use the AFP mount, not SMB. Works great.

I couldn't live with the shorter file names, though I wouldn't mind having some of the illegal characters back. We dumped AFP years ago for the superior network throughput of CIFS (SMB).

I popped open terminal this morning and plugged in the code to update the nsmb.conf. Worked like a charm. Now all our Macs old and new see the Win server the same. Thanks again, tlindner. What a relief.

 

[pcmodem]

What about switching to a Mac Server which supports long file names, AFP, Illegal characters, and better AFP speed vs the Windows AFP speed. Saves the headache of dealing with SMB.