Section 36. Allow Other Mac Users to Share Your Files


36. Allow Other Mac Users to Share Your Files

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

33 Share Your Internet Connection

35 Share Another Mac's Files


SEE ALSO

37 Share Files from a Windows PC


Although it is definitely useful to share files stored on any Mac on the network, privacy concerns dictate that each Mac be set up by default to share nothing. You must enable Personal File Sharing before other computers can access your data.

Additionally, your Mac can act as a web server, hosting web pages and other items that other people can download as they would from any Web site. Mac OS X provides a feature called Personal Web Sharing to accomplish this.

1.
Open Sharing Preferences

Open the System Preferences by selecting System Preferences from the Apple menu. Click Sharing to open the Sharing Preferences pane. Click the Services tab if it's not already selected.

2.
Set Your Computer's Name

The Computer Name text box contains an automatically chosen name for your computer, based on your full name (for instance, John Doe's Computer ). Enter a more appropriate or more creative name for your computer if you want; this name is what remote users browsing your network for file-sharing servers will see.

3.
Enable Personal File Sharing

Select the Personal File Sharing check box in the Select a service to change its settings list box. Click the Start button or the corresponding check box in the On column to start up Personal File Sharing.

36. Allow Other Mac Users to Share Your Files


4.
Place Files in Your Public Folder

With Personal File Sharing enabled, anybody in the world can connect to your computerthey can browse to it by name if they're on the local network or, if they know your IP address or hostname, they can connect to it directly without browsing, from anywhere on the Internet. If the remote user doesn't have an account on your Mac, he can only connect using Guest access; but with that level of access, he can mount your Public folder (or any other user's Public folder) and browse its contents.

Place files in the Public folder inside your Home to make them publicly accessible. Be sure to avoid placing anything in that folder that you wouldn't want the whole world to see!

5.
Enable AppleTalk

Modern Personal File Sharing on the Mac uses AppleShare/IP, a protocol based on the older proprietary AppleTalk that is designed to operate over TCP/IP (meaning that it can be used over standard routed networks such as the Internet).

NOTE

The older AppleTalk protocol is more elegant and streamlined than AppleShare/IP, but it is generally useful only in all-Mac networks or networks specifically designed to be compatible with AppleTalk. If you have such a network, you might find it to your advantage to enable AppleTalk, which gives you the ability to define a zone for your computer and to browse multiple levels of Macs in other zones.

To enable AppleTalk, open the Network Preferences pane (click the Network icon in the System Preferences ). Double-click the network interface you want to use (you can enable AppleTalk on only a single interface at a time), then click the AppleTalk tab. Use the options in that screen to make AppleTalk active, select an existing zone, or create your own zone. See 32 Activate AppleTalk for details.

6.
Enable Personal Web Sharing

Personal Web Sharing allows you to share files with anybody who has a web browser. To enable Personal Web Sharing, open the Sharing Preferences pane (click the Sharing icon in the System Preferences application), and click the Services tab. Select Personal Web Sharing in the list of services, and click the Start button (or enable the On check box). When Personal Web Sharing starts up, text appears at the bottom of the window informing you of two URLs that others can use to access your Mac: one for accessing the global page for the computer, and one for accessing your own Personal Web Sharing folder, called Sites . Click either of the URLs to view the pages to which they refer, or right-click (or Control +click) one of the URLs and select Copy from the contextual menu to copy the URL to the Clipboard so that you can paste it into an email message or a text document in another application.

Place files into your Sites folder to share them with the world. If you name a file index.html and place that file in your Sites folder, that file becomes the "default" page for the URL that is reported in the Sharing Preferences window for your Personal Web Sharing site; it appears if no filename is specified at the end of the URL. (If no index.html file is present, a user can browse the list of files in the folder.) Similarly, place files in the Library, WebServer, Documents folder under the top level of your hard disk to make them accessible to a user who accesses your computer using the URL reported for your computer's global website.



MAC OS X Tiger in a Snap
Mac OS X Tiger in a Snap
ISBN: 0672327066
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2001
Pages: 212
Authors: Brian Tiemann

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