Slashdot Mirror

It's GUI based. You can either install the Application version, or the "System Preferences" version, both which are available in the download.

You can setup SMB shares for Windows/Linux/Mac clients, or AFS shares for Mac/Linux clients (not sure if Windows does AFS - never looked into it).

After setting up a SMB share, ensure that "Windows Sharing" is enabled under "Sharing" in "System Preferences." Also, click on the "Accounts" button there and enable one or more local accounts to access the share remotely. Then, on a Windows box, it's as simple as connecting to: \\ip-address\sharename\ Enter in the username and password credentials, you'll connect, and bam, you have access to the share.

Local access rights apply to the local user connecting to the share remotely.

Make sure you un-share folders when you're done.

Well, in that regard OS X and OS X Server are just more well defined from each other than the corresponding Windows systems. OS X server allows shares of any folder. If, however, you insist on using a workstation for something it wasn't meant for, Sharepoints is quite a handy tool to accomplish this.

Want to create an arbitrary share like you can under Windows? Right clicking on the directory will not help. Pretty soon you realise there's actually no easy way to do it. Apple presumably wants you to buy OS X Server for that.

More like Apple wants all data on an OS X client machine to be somewhere in a user's folder rather than placed arbitrarily elsewhere on the drive. I have to agree with this stance-- in the pre-OS X days people would put their files wherever they wanted them (and frequently, accidentally and unknowingly where they didn't want them). If their machine became problematic and needed to be rebuilt I'd have to look in every directory for errant data files that might be important and retrieve them before wiping the drive. With OS X, stuff *must* go in their user folder. If the machine needs to be rebuilt I just have to back up the Users folder to know that I got everything of importance.

If you're too lazy to use your Public and Drop Box folders for sharing your local data with peers on the LAN, (or if you legitimately want to use a spare OS X Client machine as a cheapie file server with a 10-simultaneous-connection limit) you can always download and use SharePoints-- just not on any network that I admin. :-)

~Philly

up until today i had just stuck with itunes 4.0 so i could keep doing just that, but all the new features of 4.5 convinced me to upgrade (that and the incompatibility of the music library now)..

so now my solution is Sharepoints. i created a sharepoint of my music collection at home, copied the actual library files to my work computer, mount my music sharepoint, and voila..

while it sounds like a hassle, it really isn't that bad, in itunes 4 you'd press cmd-k to connect to your itunes library at home, now you just cmd-k in the finder to do it..

There are also a lot of advanced settings that aren't available (or close enough for mere mortals) in non-server, such as the ability to make and manage multiple AFP and SMB mount points. For example, if you connect to a non-server server via AFP, you can mount your own home directory, anyone else's public directory, or a volume. That's it. No more "make a folder and share it out as..." like Windows and OS 9 have. (Although snb.conf will do whatever you tell it.)

Fortunately, there's also a nice, free, GUI utility that'll configure that in OS X client. I used it on 10.2 with excellent results, but I haven't had to use it in 10.3 yet so I don't know if it'll still work.