How To: Leopard File Sharing

How To: Leopard File Sharing

Setting up File Sharing in Leopard is incredibly easy to do, but has a couple of gotchas to watch out for.

Step 1 is to open File Sharing under System Preferences. If you’ve setup printer sharing already then this looks familiar.

Step 2, put a check in the box that says “File Sharing”. You will see a list of users who can be “shared” to. From a security standpoint you should have a second, non-admin user setup to share too but that could cause some confusion down the road. On the right side is a list of user permissions, the defaults work pretty well. But if you’re the paranoid type you may want to change “Everyone” to write only, or even “No Access.”

At this point file sharing is good to go between multiple Mac’s only. The machine that you turned this on is going to be the “server”. Connect to it from another machine by going to finder, click on go, then “connect to server”. (Note the shortcut key of Apple-K btw.) simply type in the ip address of the “server” and hit connect. If you do not know the IP address, go into Network Settings under System Preferences to check it.

It’s a good idea to hit the + sign to add the address to your favorites so that you remember it. A password/username box will come up, enter in the credentials of the user you setup in file sharing. This is why you might want to setup a second user just for file sharing, if you have the server locked down for Parental Controls for instance this is the same password to unlock that.

Alas this will not allow Windows users to connect to your Leopard server yet. Go back to File Sharing and hit the “options” button in the lower right hand corner. By default Windows does not know about AFP or Apple File Sharing, so you need to click on SMB. Also take this opportunity to check the box that says “Account” is configured the same way as the previous screen. Simply uncheck the box next to the ones you don’t want to connect, which should be as many as possible.

On the Windows machine click on start then run. Type in (from Network settings on the server) then hit enter. A box will come up with all the shares on the server you can connect too, including printers if that was enabled. Right click on the user folder that was setup earlier and choose “Map Network Drive”. Choose a drive letter, something like h or x works best. Put a check in the box that says “Reconnect at Logon” to have Windows automatically reconnect back to the server every time it’s rebooted. If you’ve got different users with passwords setup, you’ll need to type that user name and password in on the next box.

After that, simply open up “My Computer” and you can drag and drop files to the server, or take them from there. On the server side, keep in mind that files will need to be put into /Users/username/Public folder for any other computer to access them.

One thing to be aware of is that the IP address of the server may change due to DHCP on your router. If the connection fails for any reason, double check the IP address you’re entering. That’s all there is to it, reading through the direction above it looks hard, but it’s actually pretty simple.

Please leave a comment if you have any questions about this.

4 thoughts on “How To: Leopard File Sharing

  1. Dave Miller Reply

    That’s all there is to it, reading through the direction above it looks hard, but it’s actually pretty simple. Please leave a comment if you have any questions about this.

    Actually, it looks pretty simple…but I can't get it to work! When I put in my server's IP address, I get "The network is not present or is not started." I've tried this every which way till Tuesday, but that error message is always the result I get. Yep, I've double-checked my IP address. I've double-checked the direction of my slashes (and put them in both ways). I've double-checked to be sure I've followed your instructions on the Mac side.

    I'm using Win98SE on Parallels Desktop for Mac v. 3. One of their tech people on their support board pointed readers wanting to know how to share files via Win98 here to your site.

    Any guesses as to what I'm doing wrong?? (Many thanks for your trouble!)

  2. Rick Reply

    Hi Dave,

    Thanks for the comments. The first thing to check is that you can ping the server from within both Mac and Windows. Windows 98 should work just like 2000 and XP in connecting. You might also check that Windows98 is joined to your domain, or at make the workgroup name the same as your server's domain. I seem to think Win98SE specifically had some weird networking things in it, but I really can't remember as I've not seen an install of it in roughly ten years.

    Let me know if that works, or not. I'll see about getting a copy of 98 and installing it in Parallels if not.

  3. Dave Miller Reply

    I seem to think Win98SE specifically had some weird networking things in it, but I really can’t remember as I’ve not seen an install of it in roughly ten years.

    Wow! You must've dropped it like a hot potato, since SE is only about ten years old!

    Rick, thank you for your kindness in responding. I'm really impressed that you were willing to consider unearthing an old copy of 98 and installing it in Parallels. That's dedication to your readers!

    Meanwhile, I've discovered a workaround that's actually going to be easier than the fix in this case. The new builds of Parallels come with an app called "Parallels Explorer." (Probably everyone on the planet knew about this, but I didn't until I started digging around.) Parallels Explorer lets me read and write to my VM's disk, from the Mac side. So I'm able to do what I needed to do without going through the arcanery of Win98 networking.

    Congratulations to you on a fine blog, Rick!

  4. Rick Reply

    Thank you for the comments, and thank you for the follow up.

    I will admit my exposure to Windows 98 was a bit limited. I ended up going from 95 directly to Workstation NT as that was what we were using at work at the time. I think I also was installing my first linux box back then, with beta version kernals even! I did setup several Lantastic Networks where the clients were all Windows 98 though. It was amazingly robust and best of all, simple to use and add new clients.

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