Thank you for sharing...

I am an avid Macintosh fan.  If that's not already clear from reading my blog, I want to say it for the record.  I'm geeked about the new Mac OS aptly titled Leopard coming next Friday the 26th of October and I'm also excited about the new Logic Studio 8 I've been playing around with lately, although I could use a new Mac so that I can play back my songs on it.

Where I work currently, we encourage people to use Macs for many reasons including the fact that you can actually have the Mac OS and Windows running side by side using Parallels software [Coherence mode is awesome!]. Another reason we recommend that new employees get Macs is because they have lots of extremely useful tools under the hood like BSD for starters and a terminal application appropriately called "Terminal" where Mac users can access the Unix kernel and configure their computers via a command line interface.

One of the questions that comes up often is "how can I share files with other Mac users or Mac computers on an internal network at home or at work?"  At some offices, this might be more complicated because of Windows networking issues but with the three Macs I have here in the office or the two I use at home, this is so simple it's kind of hard to believe that I haven't been taking advantage of this feature for years.

To enable file sharing, go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences and click the Sharing Preference pane in the middle of the window under Internet & Network.  If everything is set up correctly on your local network, click the Start button on the Sharing Preference page's Services tab and wait for it to finish the startup process.

Default options here are probably best but you can add additional services if desired in the services area. 

To share files, make sure that the Firewall is Off under the Firewall tab.  If you want to share your internet connection, click the Internet tab and click Start.  I have never personally used the Share Connection option but I'm sure there's a good reason to have this feature and that someone somewhere is using it right now.  Unfortunately, this feature is outside the scope of this blog post for now.

So, back to the important details.  How is the shared Mac accessed from another machine you ask?  First you need to know what the address of the shared computer is.  By clicking the Sharing Preference pane with the Services tab selected, if Sharing is enabled [Personal File Sharing should definitely be checked as well] some text that says the following appears near the bottom of the Preference pane window when Sharing is the currently selected preference pane and when File Sharing is enabled:

"Other Macintosh users can access your computer at afp://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/ or browse for "username" by choosing Network from the Go menu in the Finder."

So, from any other computer that is not explicitly blocked from accessing other machines on the network, the address is what is specified in that sentence.

From another networked Macintosh computer, choose Connect To Server from the Finder's Go menu.  Enter the address that appeared in the shared computer's Sharing Preference panel and click the + button to add the address to the list.  Keep in mind that if you're network is running a DHCP server [dynamically allocated internal IP address server], this address will probably change often so it might be necessary to recheck it the next time you want to connect to the shared computer.  If you try to connect to an address that worked previously, double-check that the address has not been changed since the last connection was made.

Once the address has been added to the list, click the item in the list of Favorite Servers and then click Connect.  You will be prompted to enter a username and password for the remote machine.

This brings up a separate issue.  It will likely be necessary to create accounts on the shared computer so that you can access all of the folders and drives associated with it.  Go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences > Accounts Preference pane and enable Guest access, or create new accounts with specific access rules as necessary.  Guest access will allow you to see the Public folder and the Share folder with restrictions on many folders.

In the Accounts window click the Lock to change settings for a given user account or to add Guest access to your computer.  keep in mind that with default settings, only the Public folder that appears in your user's home directory should be accessible to other users unless you log in as you from the remote machine.  Also noteworthy is the drop box folder where guests and other users that are not you can drop files and folders for you even though they can't see the contents of the folder.

Good luck and happy sharing on the Mac.