Networking Macs & PCs

I need to know if there are any special procedures to network a group of Powermac G4's running OS9 and a group of PC's running Win2k Pro; besides running a cable between the network switches and firewall configs.

They all use tcp/ip, so normal things like ftp and http would work fine between them. The file sharing mechanism you use on Windows machines is a technology devised by Microsoft though, OS9 can't access it out of the box. OSX can.

If you have a Win2k server, you can host Appleshare shares with that. If you want to spend money, you could buy some software for the Macs to let them access Windows smb shares. Or you could just do with ftp or http for file transfers. Or you could set up a Linux box with both netatalk and samba to be a bridge for the other machines to swap files through. Or if you don't care about moving files between the machines you can ignore the issue altogether.

Basically, I'm only transferring image files from the Macs to the PC systems (jpg, tiff, psd) saved in PC format from Photoshop in a photo lab. The PC's run printer systems that print digital files onto silver halide paper via a pretty cool laser head. Thanks for the tips and I'll figure out where to go next.

DAVE or PCMacLan would work as well.

If one of your PC's is running NT or 2K server, you can use AppleTalk on them.