Simple file sharing between FC2 and Mac OS X?

[Patrick McSwiggen]

On Sep 15, 2004, at 5:03 PM, D. D. Brierton wrote:
> Although Mac OS X is BSD under the hood, and so not dissimilar to 
> Linux, I don't really have much experience with it and she (the 
> graphic designer) is not technical at all. I don't want to waste the 
> first hour fiddling around trying to
> set things up so that we can easily share files

MacOS X comes with samba (smbd) already setup, but it needs to be 
turned on. (Client is always ready to use.) On the MacOS X machine open 
the System Preferences. (Go to the Dock and click on the icon that's an 
off-white rectangle with what looks like a light switch and a gray 
apple side-by-side.) When that opens, click on the Sharing icon (looks 
like a folder with a yellow diamond on it. Actually the diamond looks 
like a Pedestrian Crossing sign--don't ask me what the connection is!). 
Once that's open there will be a list of services that can be turned on 
or off down the left side. These include:
"Personal File Sharing" -> AppleTalk server
"Windows Sharing" -> smbd
"Remote Login" -> sshd
"FTP access" -> ftpd

When Windows Sharing is on and selected there is a message across the 
bottom that tells you how to connect back to the machine. E.g., mine 
right now says: "Windows users can access your computer at 
\\192.168.1.102\mcswgn".

Pre MacOS 10.3 you had to reset the users password in order to use smb 
to connect to the computer after turning Windows sharing on. (I presume 
this was because only the unix encrypted password was saved and not the 
LM/NT passwords, so these would have to be generated.) I don't see the 
same under 10.3, so maybe these are saved right from the start now. If 
she is running an earlier version of MacOS X, though, go to the 
Accounts in System preferences (same place as you found Sharing--it 
might have been called Users in earlier versions) and check mark the 
box that says something like "Allow this user to connect from Windows". 
This is where it would tell you to re-enter the password. Note it does 
not need to be changed, just retyped.

Any of the above services would allow you to connect from your machine 
to hers (with the appropriate protocol). In some ways the FTP access 
might be the easiest. Particularly if you have a nice GUI FTP client on 
your machine. If you want to go the other way and have smbd running on 
your machine, she should see your machine on the network. If not, she 
would go to the "Go" menu (from the Finder) -> "Connect to Server...", 
and use the syntax smb://192.168.1.102/mcswgn (to use the example 
above. Note the forward slashes). Or use ftp://.... for FTP access. 
Either would make your machine appear as another disk on her computer 
(so files can be transfered by drag and drop).

Of course, you can also ftp, etc. from the command line, but I didn't 
think that might be as good if the other person is not technically 
savvy.

-- 
Patrick D. McSwiggen                            pat.mcswiggen at uc.edu
Mathematical Sciences                            513-556-4080
University of Cincinnati                         513-556-3417 FAX