Apple issue with not seeing windows servers over the wireless

[Wycombegav]

Hi

I work in a school with a managed wireless system. Managed by the Cisco 2500 controller.

My issue is that when the children and teachers log on using a Mac they can not see any of the Windows servers. Most of the work is saved on shares on the Windows side of things so this is a real issue.

You can ping the servers, you just cant see them when trying to browse to them.

Any Ideas anyone?

[George Stefanick]

Hi and wlcome to CSC, notice its your first post.

The WLC 2504 is a wireless switch. It just passes through traffic like a switch would. Sounds like you have connection between the server subnet and the wireless subnet. Is there a FW that is allowing ping and blocking othe ports ?

The control in of itself wouldnt block that UNLESS a acl is somehwere in line.

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"Satisfaction does not come from knowing the solution, it comes from knowing why." - Rosalind Franklin

[Wycombegav]

Thanks for your reply

As far as I know there are no ACL's in place. We had an issue where wirelessly we couldnt see any of the server untill we enabled settings for Bonjour on the controller as recomended on Cisco's website. We now can see and access all Mac shares but windows shares are a mystery.

An External company came in and did the initial set up and have been pretty useless since then. Its becoming quite frustrating.

[Scott Fella]

Make sure the windows server FW is not blocking SMB file sharing.

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[stevebohrer]

We have had trouble getting Windows shares to appear across differenet VLAN subnets, even just on our wired network, and for both Windows and Mac clients. Our workaround (which is manual rather than automatic) is to explicitly enter the server and share name on the client, rather than browse for it. Not great, but we only use a couple of servers, so it works okay for us. On Windows we have to enter the server as \\serverName\shareName, and on Mac's as smb://serverName/shareName .

So, this may not be strictly a wireless problem. The fundanental issue, which is similar to your bonjour problems, is that these protocols seem to assume that all the clients and servers are in the same broadcast domain, and if they are in seperate vlans, they're not, so the potocols don't work. AFAIK, things like the "bonjour settings on the controller" that you mention are various hacks to forward broadcast requests from one vlan to a server somewhere else.

Steve

[Scott Fella]

Like Stephan mentioned, I enter the windows shares manually for my windows share at home on my MacBook. I'm also guessing they implemented the bonjour gateway as in this link

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/wireless/ps4570/products_tech_note09186a0080bb1d7c.shtml

This allows Apple devices to communicate but doesn't make windows and apple to like each other:) If you search on the web, you will see most of the post is to manually enter the windows share, so you might be stuck at manually having to enter those.

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[Wycombegav]

Seems as though it was a dodgy box. Changed the box with the most resent firmware and it all worked fine.

[Scott Fella]

Thanks for posting your solution.

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