SMB is a protocol that I believe M$ came up with. It enables you to share resources over a network. Amongst other things, this will include folders and printers. Mac OS X is pre-equiped with a client that can talk this protocol - the SAMBA client. SAMBA is a reverse-engineered protocol adaptor for SMB. You only have to install the SAMBA package if you actually want to share stuff on your Mac OS X box. If you only want to connect to shared windows resources, then the pre-installed stuff will work just fine.
You *may* find SAMBA pre-installed on UNIX networks. BUT SAMBA is inherently insecure in some ways - for example the last time I checked, the password was sent over the network unencrypted. For this reason many admins choose not to install SAMBA on their UNIX machines.
NFS is the Network File System. This is the primary means for UNIX machines to share their drives/folders on a network. It runs over the Sun RPC protocol. Some consider this to be too insecure also (but you can also argue that simply networking your machine is insecure
). I wouldn't recommend trying to set up NFS shares unless you are willing to invest a bit of time learning about UNIX-type-stuff
(It is actually quite easy - but non-UNIX ppl tend to have their difficulties with it ...)
RIGHT. As to the 5023 Error - I have *no* idea what that could mean. Unfortunately many programmers forget that users can't figure out what a numeric code is supposed to mean
... however, I've found that often when you are presented with a mere error code, it means that something quite nasty has happened and you should contact support about that.
Things you should check:
Make sure that the two computers can see each other. I.e. ping them (you can do a ping on the windows box from the command line. From the Mac OS X box, you can either use the terminal.app or you can use the network utility which is under Applications / Utilities)
Make sure the windows folder you want to access is shared. The best thing would be to check from another windows box whether you can access it from there (has one of your colleagues got a machine you could check from? If not, you'll just have to believe the windows box what it tells you - the previous poster was correct - just open an Explorer window and right-click - you can then check under sharing that you have a) actually shared it and b) given the various ppl / groups the relevant access privileges)
Check that you have got the SMB URL correct. It *has* to be in the form I described in my first post: smb://<machine name>/<share name>
It is very important to include the share name - if you only have the machine name, it won't work!
If all of this fails, it may be worth going for the FTP option instead - System Preferences -> Sharing -> Allow FTP Access. Then simply log on via an FTP client to your Mac OS X box with your UID/PWD and get/put the files you want.
Another option is to use 'secure copy' or scp. To use this, you have to enable remote login on your Mac OS X machine and then obtain an SSH client for you windows box. There are several out there - just Google for one (personally, I have Cygwin installed on all of the Windows machines I use, and there's OpenSSH in there!) Then you can simply do:
scp <my local file> <user name>@<machine name>:<remote file>
to copy a local file to the remote machine. You will be prompted to the password before it performs the copy. You can also swap local file and the remote URL in order to download a file from the remote machine.
Example:
scp my_file.txt
LordCoven@my.linux.box:/home/bob/tmp
This would copy the file 'my_file.txt' from the local directory to a remote machine called 'my.linux.box'. The scp program will attempt to log you on to the remote machine as the user LordCoven and will attempt to copy the file to the directory /home/bob/tmp (if that directory exists - otherwise it would attempt to create a file called tmp in the directory /home/bob) ... of course, the user you log in as has to have the relevant privileges on the remote machine.
Right - I think that's just about enough for one day - don't you???
If you still have no luck - well - I don't think there's anything more I can add
Soz.
Anyway - best of luck with all that!
C