MacOS – Multi threaded file copy

You could use the SAMBA protocol (or Apple's implementation of it), to connect to a Windows Share.

Either open Finder and choose "Go" -> "Connect to Server" in the menu bar.

Now connect to your share(s) using the SMB:// as protocol definition. If activated it will ask you for authentication afterwards. Then the share will be mounted like any other mount point.

Or you could use the terminal to mount the file system using the

mount_smbf

command.

After you've mounted the Windows Share you should be able to use any command line tool or GUI software do to your copying. Instead of robocopy you could use rsync for example (which is built in and pretty powerful).

One note: Just remember that saving files directly from within apps on a share could cause some troubles if they are using Apples's Versions feature, which is not supported by FAT or NTFS file systems.

regarding getting your SMB sharing connection from linux working...

Samba no more, mount.cifs needs extra options, "nounix,sec=ntlmssp"

Don't use the linux gui to connect, have bro open a terminal and try these commands

(and dig my ascii art!)

          =^..^=       `·.¸¸ ><((((º>.·´¯`·><((((º>   

amitsbrother@linux:~$ 
amitsbrother@linux:~$ sudo apt-get install cifs-utils
  ...
amitsbrother@linux:~$ mkdir /mnt/mavericks_smb
amitsbrother@linux:~$ mount.cifs //172.17.8.212/smb_share /mnt/mavericks_smb/ -o user=amitsbrother,password=trustno1,nounix,sec=ntlmssp
amitsbrother@linux:~$ 
amitsbrother@linux:~$ mkdir /mnt/mavericks_smb_dup
amitsbrother@linux:~$ mount -t cifs //172.17.8.212/smb_share /mnt/mavericks_smb-dup -o username=amitsbrother,password=trustno1,nounix,sec=ntlmssp

Once this is working, you can create a script for your brother to automatically mount when it is executed from the gui. Basically, the script is just the mount point creation, and the cifs connection to the smb server... so 2 or 3 lines including the shebang.

Make sharing work now with no passwords

To make it super simple, I'd enable web sharing on the Mac, and put the files you want to share to the Linux box in a folder in ~/Sites/a_folder/ . Then give your brother the address that it tells is your personal web sharing address in the Sharing Preferences pane when you enabled Web Sharing. Tell your brother to open a browser and put in that address; it will give him a directory listing as long as there is no index.html file in there. He can download files with his browser. This is one way sharing, from the Mac to the linux box, and will work fine as long as there are no files over 4GB (unless apache fixed that issue and didn't tell me about it). I believe directory listing is enabled by default on the Mac apache2 server.

To share in the other direction, from linux to Mac, you could do the same from the Linux box:

 sudo apt-get install apache2

You can enable directory listings on the Linux apache2 server with instructions here. Those instructions inadvertantly also cover how to get the apache2 server up and running. Then you need the ip address of the Linux box, and the relative location from the apache root to see the files in your Mac's browser.

This shouldn't take 5 minutes to set up 2 x 1-way sharing through browsers on both boxes, and relieves you from hacing to trouble-shoot the slightly more complex task of installing and configuring netatalk or running SMB sharing from the mac and getting the linux client to mount it, which isn't always a "it just works" situation, like running 2 apache2 servers is.