sharing aliased files/drives on LAN with windows machines

zo

How?



And why on earth does it not allow me to create a user called "guest"? Says I cant create that login.



Anyway, the important thing is that I want to share an HD that is on my Mac with fellow Windows users on the company LAN. Aliases/Shortcuts aren't recognized.



What I did was create a new user called "guest1" and I added a shortcut/alias from a folder of the other HD (not FW/USB, its an internal HD) to the "Public" folder of 'guest1'. People can enter the 'guest1' folder (only if they know the address btw, it doesnt show up on network browser... *sigh*) but the shortcut appears as a file and doesnt do its job.



Help?



PS I heard its easier/faster to setup an FTP share instead of normal File Sharing. We have to share very large files.

karrick

Although starting up your built-in FTP server is an easy answer, it's perhaps not going to give you what you really want.



Mac OS X + Windows file sharing is improving with each release of Mac OS X. This is because each release of Mac OS X has a further developed version of Samba (www.samba.org).



There still remains some quirks to the process, and there are opportunities for creative minds to make money (http://www.thursby.com/products/dave.html) by making it easier to share files back in forth.



There are some free alternatives, but sometimes they take a bit more time to get it right the first time. After that, everything's a breaze. This is simply because the Windows file sharing protocol is not published by Microsoft, and developers have to try to match the standard when the standard is potentially changing with each service pack upgrade Microsoft performs on its various versions of Windows.



To ease your pain, try doing a google search for this (http://www.google.com/search?q=mac+w...UTF-8&oe=UTF-8). A couple of good articles are on the O'Reilly MacDevCenter website (http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/ma...19/mac_pc.html). There is also a really neat website setup to answer these frustrations at MacWindows (http://www.macwindows.com/).



I hope your answers are found without too much hassle,

Karrick

ericeason

You can create an account with the name guest, but the short name hase to be something different than guest. I have an account set up as Guest but guest1 as the short name. Hope this helps.