2 posts tagged “reference”

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.

I just installed Firefox 2.0 on my iMac G5 after reading about the new version release this week and I was having a really hard time figuring out how to enable the new Session Restore feature that was mentioned in the Release Notes.  There's no documentation in the notes as to how to enable it to work like the now obsolete Session Saver add-on that I've come to love and rely on heavily in Firefox.  The application Saft for Mac OS X's Safari browser has a similar tab save and restore feature but Safari 2 just doesn't cut the mustard for many of the web 2.0 application sites, including Vox.  Hopefully, Safari 3.0 will fare better than 2.0 has with these new website applications.

So, I was just looking at the Firefox Add-Ons page for Session Saver and discovered that there is no new version of this software and no way to contact Rue, the creator of the Firefox Session Saver plug-in.  I also searched the Firefox Help via the Help menu and there's no entry anywhere for Session Restore which is really stupid.

Luckily, someone was nice enough to mention where the feature can be selected in the Session Saver user comments on the Firefox Add-Ons site and I have the scoop for those that are having the same difficulty I was.

In Windows, go to Options > Main > When Firefox Starts and select Show my windows and tabs from last time.  The default is normally Show my home page.  What this does is, every time you close Firefox 2 with one or more tabs open, the same tabs are opened again the next time the application is launched.  I absolutely love this feature.  Your mileage may vary depending on your personal taste.

For Mac users, the instructions are just a tad bit different: Go to Firefox > Preferences > When Firefox starts and select the Show my windows and tabs from last time option from the pop-up.

With the addition of Session Restore in Firefox 2.0, there are some really nifty features that are still missing from the add-on Session Saver and the Safari-only Saft application's equivalent tab saving feature.  Session Restore also restores all previously open pages or tabs after a crash of the browser which on the surface is very useful but sometimes, you need to be able to pick and choose from the list of pages that were open when the crash occurred because one of the open tabs may have caused the crash and you don't want it to be reopened and have the browser crash all over again.  Only Saft for Safari provides a pick list of pages or tabs that were open prior to the crash where you can choose which pages or tabs you want it to open and remove pages that might have been the source of the browser crash.

Another feature that is missing in Firefox 2.0's new Session Restore that Session Saver .2 and Safari's Saft include is the ability to save a specific group of tabs as a set.  When the tab is saved in Saft or with older versions of Session Saver, selecting the user-defined saved tab set item from the appropriate menu opens all of the tabs that were saved at the time of creation into a new browser window.  I like that feature but it's not nearly as important as being able to choose which pages to restore after a crash.

I hope someone find this information helpful.