Windows doesn’t have a long history of interoperability and standards compliance, but the history it does have is somewhat checkered. As a result, most Macintosh administrators develop a knee-jerk aversion to Microsoft products and protocols. So when the first few Photoshop files wind up corrupted on your SMB file shares, complaining of inconsistent permissions issues or just displaying jumbled nonsense, it’s easy to blame the problem on the Windows workstations. More often than not, though, it’s a configuration error on Mac OS X Server that renders these files unavailable or unreadable.

In the late eighties, the original Stuffit was an invaluable utility, bringing compression and archiving capabilities to the Macintosh filesystem. In Mac OS X, however, you could soon right-click on any file or folder to create a cross-platform .zip file with the “Make Archive” feature (now called “Compress” in Leopard). While the need to compress files with Stuffit passed long ago, the need to “unstuff” old archives has never disappeared. The Unarchiver can open .sit files, as well as more than thirty other legacy formats (such as Disk Doubler and BinHex), and does it all for free.

Security policy means different things to different companies. In some environments, using managed preferences to control external drive access would be considered draconian. In others, leaving the Airport card plugged in (or firewire ports connected) is thought of as irresponsible. What can a systems administrator do to limit hardware use on company machines?