We have a client with two offices, one is a PC shop and the other is a Mac shop. The enjoy a friendly rivalry and it's up to me to make sure that they play nicely together.

We recently upgraded the servers in Microsoft shop to Windows 2003 and found that the Mac clients could no longer access the shares over the VPN.

Some googling and experimenting later, and we stumbled upon the issue.

The Samba client that the Macs use doesn't support encrypted communications, and the Windows 2003 server out of the box turns on encrypted communications and prevents anyone who isn't encrypting from accessing its shares.

So, a quick detour through the Domain Controller Security Policy applet in the Administrative Tools folder did the trick.

In there, go to Local Policies / Security Options.

Scroll down to "Microsoft network server: digitally sign communications (always)" and set that sucker to DISABLED.

Reapply the policy by running GPUPDATE (start, run, gpupdate) and sit back in delight as your clients can connect to the shares once again.

Thanks to MacOSXHints and AllInTheHead for the pointers.

I've recently run into some space issues on my primary partition on my home Mac Mini. Not really problems, since I've got 200GB of additional storage attached to it, but you never want to have a primary partition wanting for space (on any system, as you need that "free space" for the page file/virtual memory).

On Windows machines, I recommend using a tool like SpaceMonger to profile your hard drive(s) and delete unwanted files, etc. (Note - NEVER DELETE a file unless you know what it is, what it does, and that it's unnecessary or redundant)

On my Mac, I had already analyzed my disk, moved or deleted things that didn't belong on my system drive, but I still didn't have as much free space as I'd like. And that's when I discovered Xslimmer.

Most (90%) of Mac programs are now "Universal Binary" programs, meaning that they can run on older, PowerPC-powered Macs as well as new, Intel-powered machines. Which means (basically) that there's two sets of code on every program that's on your hard drive. Additionally, Mac programs often ship (download) with multiple language packs to support a broader range of users. I only speak English, so I rarely (never) need to run a program in Spanish. Or Dutch. Or whatever they speak in Kazakhstan.

What Xslimmer does is analyzes your applications folder, and strips out the code you don't need. If you have a PowerPC Mac, it will strip out the Intel code from your apps, and vice versa. It also removes unnecessary language packs from your apps. The initial analysis and "slimming" took about an hour (during which time I was still able to work without any memory hit) and it saved me almost 4.5GB of space!

So if you've got some Mac bloat (and lots of applications), Xslimmer might help your Mac fit into its thin jeans again!

That was the Keanu Reeves in the Matrix "Woah", in case you didn't recognize it.

Anyway - I'm Brian, and I am a Mac User.

("Hi, Brian")

It's true, I do not use a PC at home (except the occasional VMWare virtual PC session). So while I'm happy fixing PCs and offering PC advice, I'll occasionally dole out some Mac love.

For the Mac folks out there, do yourself a favor and download Minefield. They're PowerPC or Intel optimized builds of Firefox 3. The performance of the Intel optimized build makes me never want to go back to Camino again. Blazing fast startup and page views. Truly awesome. (They're named "Minefield" so as not to interfere with any Mozilla/Firefox trademarks.)