Sharing aliased files/drives on LAN with windows machines

[ZO]

maybe I can get some help 'round here....

so, any ideas?


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.

[FFL]

Not positive, but I believe that "guest" is a special reserved user in unix - it's pre-installed, so you can't create one with that name.

And, I think the actual folder, and not an alias, needs to be in the Public folder. You might have better luck with a symbolic link created in the Terminal, but I'm not enough of a CLI jockey to walk you through that one.

[Gargoyle]

ln -s <old path> <new_path>

Damn, does that make me a CLI jockey? :D

Here is a "real world" example...

ln -s /Users/joe/Some_Directory /Users/dave/Some_Directory

This makes dave's "Some_Directory" point to joe's "Some_Directory". Important There might be some security issues with doing this and using the file sharing. For obvious reasons, the software has to be told to allow the following of links - otherwise you could just create a link in your folder to some other users folder and start looking round!

[ZO]

thanx... I'll try it out at work. Although I'm not 100% sure what I'm
supposed to do.

lemme see if I got this right, if I have
HD1/.../Users/guest1/Public/Shared and the actual "Shared" directory is on HD2, I type in ls -s HD1/.../Users/guest1/Public/Shared HD2/Shared
?

And then when a Windows user goes to company.domain.net/guest1 and log in, they will enter the Public folder and when they enter the "Shared" folder, it will be the folder that I indicated before?

Just to rant...

WHY does file sharing have to be so stupid on MacOS X? On windows it's just "right click on flder, select "share this folder", fill in properties... and, yes, sometims it actually DOES work!"

Can't anyone make a CMM that will enable the same thing on OSX? Maybe in combination with Sharepoints?

[Gargoyle]

No you got it backwards. its:-

ln -s <Real File/Directory> <Name of link to create>