As I mentioned in another thread, our company is planning some software upgrades (Adobe CS5.5 and Quark 9) which will require purchasing a couple of new iMacs and upgrading all other Macs to Lion 10.7 as well.

Now, our boss hasn't got a budget to upgrade our creaking old G4 server to a newer Intel-based Mac running 10.7 Server - so the plan is to leave the server as is for now. Currently, it's running Tiger 10.4.11 Server and as it's an old G4 that's as far as it will go!!

Now, I've got a feeling that Apple have messed about with various networking bits in Lion (and previously Snow Leopard) in regards to AFP shares and AppleTalk. In particular, I remember printers had problems that relied on AppleTalk, not sure about AppleShare (AFP) but I've got that feeling in the pit of my stomach that something's changed over the years.

The only thing I could find is this...
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/35 ... 0&tstart=0
(but there's no answer)

So, my question is, does anyone else have experience of connecting Macs running the latest OS (Lion 10.7) with an older version of Mac OS X Server (10.4.11)? Does it work OK, are there any issues to bear in mind, or is it "business as usual" compared to earlier versions of standard OS X? One thing to add: We don't store user's Home folders on the server, all the server does is share volumes (an attached RAID) over the network as AFP shared folder which mount on the client Macs as a volume, so nothing fancy.

Thanks as always!

I don't have any experience of your main question, but I can confirm that Snow Leopard and up has dispensed with the AppleTalk protocols.

The upshot is, if any of your printers use AppleTalk and don't support regular IP network printing you won't be able to use them.

That's interesting, since iTunes still installs it on Windows

It's a current bone of contention with me. Windows XP and upwards can be used to set up iCloud, whereas I can only do it from my Mac if I have installed the very latest version of Lion.

Thanks Heather, the printer at work is my other big concern - it's an old (12-year old?!) Xerox DocuColor 12, connected to a Fiery X12 RIP box. Currently, I think it connects via AppleTalk, but as to whether it supports IP Network configuration, I couldn't even guess! More research is needed on that one I think. There is no money to replace the printer, so this is something else I need to be 100% sure on before we upgrade.

The boss, in his infinite wisdom, has given me a strict £5,000 budget "and not a penny more" - and with that I need to replace two old G5s with new iMacs and buy 4 sets of software upgrades to Adobe CS5.5 and QuarkXpress 9, plus one or two other bits of software (Suitcase Fusion, MS Office, etc). And no doubt he wants change out of that too!! Whichever way I add up the figures, I can't get it down to £5,000 - nearest is £6,100, some "creative accounting" is required I feel. Bosses, eh?

If these new Macs integrate seamlessly with our ancient old kit, I'll eat my hat - it will be a small miracle.
Thanks again.

Do you really need Office? The free open source versions are quite adequate for most tasks.

Suitcase, well, I can't answer that one. I now use the Apple FontBook software because I don't shuffle fonts about like I used to.

If you're quick the special offer on QuarkXPress is valid until 31 January - £279 upgrade from any previous registered version.

Printers are a nightmare, generally. Most new ones work happily, but older ones can be hit and miss. I have an HP 2100M that I managed to cajole into further use by installing a JetDirect card. There's still a hint of driver support for it in Snow Leopard, or Gutenberg emulated drivers. Nice to be able to continue using a printer that's outlived all my old Macs since about 1996! Sadly, the card is intermittent, and frankly I'm bored with continually losing the printer in the ether. I fear it's for Silicon Heaven soon.

The dc12 should be fine, when we had one yonks ago, the pc connected to it over ip. As for the tiger thing, I'll have a look tomorrow, the printers have upgraded to lion, and I run osx tiger server. We're in the same building, so our networks are connected.

Just seen you've got a fiery rip, we had a splash one, but even so, I'm sure you'll be fine...

Thanks, Tom - that's good to know it supports IP. I've also asked our IT company who our kit is under maintenance contract with, and they're not sure about the 10.4 Server or the printer but they're going to bring one of their Macbooks running 10.7 into the office tomorrow to test them so we should hopefully have a better idea then. But any experience from real world use is also very valuable too. Just because it makes the connection to the printer, doesn't necessarily mean Quark 9 or CS 5 will print to it!

And yes, I realise the DC12 is ancient and due for the scrapyard, but the boss say he can't afford to replace it until at the very least towards the end of this year. Originally it cost about £20,000 and was a serious piece of kit, but that was about 12 years ago. Still, he's had his money's worth out of it, hasn't he!

The Quark offer is the reason behind the urgency for these upgrades, as it ends next week. To upgrade our 4 copies of Quark 7 will save us around £2,000 as when this offer ends there's no upgrade path from version 7 to 9 after then, so you have to pay the full price of £799. So, a saving of £2,000 is not to be sniffed at in these times.

One thing we are considering is buying the Home and Student Edition of Office 2011 - a bit naughty as it's not intended for business use but needs must, I'm afraid. 4 copies of the full edition for £600, compared to £90 for the Home Edition (with 3 licences I think). I think our conscience can live with it on this one occasion.

I run home and business as I only use it to open customer files, so I have absolutely no moral issue with it as I originate nothing on it.

Not saying don't upgrade as i'm about to take the plunge myself, but don't do it just for the quark thing. You could just upgrade quark and not use it. I'm about to upgrade to cs 5.5 from 4 even though I haven't installed 4 yet, just so I won't have to pay more 6 when it comes out. The quark deal has really piqued my interest too as I'm tempted to upgrade the two copies of 6 I have just because it's so cheap!

Interested about the dc12, was it bought second hand? I only ask as we had one of the first in the country and my boss wanted to buy it, but wasn't allowed as it had to be rented from xerox. Think it was about 80k over three years. I did get a trip to drupa out of it though, so it was fine by me.

Then buy the software now, don't wait for the rest to sort itself out. You're only buying software and licences after all, it's not as if they have a use by date. Unless the offer requires you to install it by Jan 31st anyway...

As for office... Do you actually need MS office specifically? I'd consider your actual requirements before doing anything dodgy. There are decent alternatives around.

Jon

Only if you don't need to send documents out to clients or partners... They have a tendancy to totally cock-up the formatting, OO.o Writer and Presenter are the worst offenders. I worked for an advertising company, who insisted on using OO.o, but it became so embarrassing, when the customers kept complaining about page breaks in the wrong place or diagrams that were totally wonky (it is really embarrassing, when you send out process flow diagrams and the lines between the process boxes point to totally different processes as those you had them originally pointing to!), that they relented and bought a couple of copies of MS Office, so that the documents could be proofed, before sending them out!


If it is a Xerox, it should be able to use plain TCP/IP printing. If not, make a Samba printer share on one of the Macs which can print and print over that machine.

HP printers can last a long time, they are surprisingly well made, at least those from the previous decade!

We still use/support a lot of dot-matrix printers - our industry requires protocol prints of each transaction (weighing of carcasses or readings from the Fat-o-Meter) and they must be printed immediately, which any "page based" modern laser or inkjet printer cannot do.

Well, the IT guy came in today and managed to connect fine from his Macbook running 10.7 to our G4 server running 10.4 - copied files back and forth and everything seems to work as expected. So a big tick in that box.

However, he tried to set up our printer on his Macbook via the IP option and whilst it tried to connect, it failed with an error (something to do with not being able to get the status). So, it looks like our upgrades aren't going to happen until the boss has enough spare cash to replace the printer for something more up to date. The most up to date printer driver was from 2007, so I'm not sure it's going to be that reliable even if we did manage to get it to print.

I never thought about setting up a print server, so that might be worth looking into, but to be honest I think I'd rather wait until we can do it properly.

There are plenty of reasonably priced colour printer and multi-function systems out there, depending on what you need.

You can pick up a half decent MFC for under 500€, we are looking at a high end Kyocera, with colour photocopier, multiple bins (A4, A4 landscape and A3), high speed, sorter etc. for around 2000€.

Several of my clients use the Kyocera beasts and they are very pleased with them. A couple have good Canon ones too, I end up piggybacking on the Canons more often to do prints, so am more aware of their faults/foibles.