Thank you all for responding to my post. To summarize, everyone who uses
Totalnet Advanced Server likes and recommends it, if you have the money.
Andrew Merkert's comment was typical of current Totalnet users:
> We have about 1000 licenses in use within our company and have had very
> good success getting our WFW, Novell, Windows 95 and Windows NT to
> connect to our SUN servers. We have also studied many NFS server and
> client products for NT servers and client platforms and have had very
> little success.
>
One TAS user addressed how Totalnet performed with Appletalk. Robert D.
Worsham said he liked the overall product, but:
> My only complaint is that they use yet
> another method of handling the resource forks for the Macintosh files.
> Specifically it's not compatible with having MAE (Macintosh Application
> Environment) access the files via NFS, but it does work if MAE accesses
> the files via the AT server
For free solutions, the number one suggestion for Windows clients was Samba.
A few people made suggestions for providing Appletalk services. Those
free products were Columbia Appletalk Package, Netatalk
(http://www.umich.edu/~rsug/netatalk), and Gatorbox.
For alternative commerical products, one person said Pacershare and Pacerprint
has worked "OK" for a long time. Shriman Gurung hesitated but wrote:
> I'm loath to say it, but the other route you could go is NT. NT provides
> pretty good file and print services for Mac which allow them to share
> their files with 95 clients. You can get NFS servers for NT also.
>
A couple of plugs came in for Humminbird's NFS Maestro client NFS software for
Windows 95.
A handful of comments addressed administering client-side or server-side software.
One representative comment came from Karl von Jena:
> I prefer the second [using server-side software] method as I'd prefer
> administrating two packages on the server over 300 packages on the
> clients.
>
All in all, my department is currently taking advantage of Syntax's 30-day
trial period with Totalnet Advanced Server. Unless the product completely misses
the boat, we'll probably puchase it.
Thank you all for your timely response,
Chris Chrysostom
IHC Genetice Research