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Panther Part 3. Talking to the world (Networking)
The bad old days
Whats the use of having a operating system with as much promise as OSX has if it has problems talking to the world (other than the Apple world!), and yes Jaguar had some real problems, especially with SMB (the Windoze world) and NFS (the UNIX world). These problems where getting close to driving me totally insane, the result being I was really giving some serious thought to loading PPC Linux on my Powerbook, and writing OSX off as a bad idea.
The Jaguar SMB pain was the worse I have ever seen in over 18 years working in IT, and made it close to the top of my "strangeness list". As to the nature of this mess, when connecting to a Windoze share using SMB, all would connect OK, things then started to go down hill fast when I tried to copy files from the Mac to the doze. It would look like it was actually copying, then when finished the copied files would just vanish, leaving no errors, no nothing.
Copying in the other direction was not exactly pain free, although it did have a different problem. This time the copy would work "sometimes" other times it failed with one of a number of worthless error messages, such as "unknown error (-1)", "unknown error (-41)" etc.
With this mess, the only way I could copy files between the Mac and the doze was to, jump into the command line, and use the good old trusty UNIX cp command, which worked most of the time.
The actual cause of this mess, could be yet another Finder bug, Samba, or any combination of the two, with my bet being on a combination of Samba and the Apple networking layers. And yes I did speak to Apple about this, but no fix was ever found, and Panther is now here, so its not likely to ever be known what caused this one.
As for the NFS, well the pain with that was less odd, it just connected when it felt like it, other times the connection would just drop, and refuse to reconnect with "incorrect username/password" errors.
In short, networking was a mess, and no I was not the only one with these issues, the SMB one was fairly widespread, with reports of the same thing both local to me and overseas.
The brave new world
Well with panther we are really talking a totally new world, as from the first time I tried connecting to a doze share, everything just worked without any sign of the old pain. I even really stressed it by copying both huge files (around 2GB) and massive numbers of small files (100K+ <50K) in both directions for several hours with not a single Panther problem.
Impressive? well yes, and something the Jaguar would never have managed. Not to say this test was totally pain free, but no need to worry as the pain was on the doze box, which crashed several times with the dreaded blue screen of death. As it happens this was a good thing as it gave a real world opportunity to see if Apple had fixed another annoying Jaguar problem, which caused OSX to "stop" or even "kernel panic" when a SMB server with active connections just vanished without being disconnected first.
Panther did pass this one, but not without a very minor issue, where a error dialog was shown on the Mac complaining about the doze box being unavailable and offering to disconnect. Trying to disconnect did nothing but bring up the same error dialog after about 30 seconds, a pattern which it repeated for ever, or until I relaunched Finder. Well its not exactly fixed, but its still a vast improvement over Jaguar, and while not ideal is something thats tolerable.
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