Sharing a Mac Volume (eg. Firewire HD) to Windows Computers
1. Create a new user that you can use to log in to your Mac from a Windows computer. This is so your own Mac user account won't get compromised. For example create a user called "Guest" with the password "12345".
2. Open a Terminal windows and login as an admin.
type:
su name_of_your_admin_account
Enter your password. "su" means substitute user.
3. Change to the home directory of the new user you created in step 1.
type:
cd /Users/Guest
4. Create a symbolic link to the volume you want to share. In this example my external Firewire drive is labeled "Mobile HD".
type:
sudo ln -s /Volumes/Mobile\ HD
Now there will be an alias to the contents of "Mobile HD" in Guest's home directory. If you created this alias the normal way in the Finder, then Windows doesn't recognise it. You have to use the Terminal to create this symbolic link.
5. Now when you log in to your Mac from a Windows computer as Guest, you will be able to read/write to the whole volume.
Meldavid, does that same principle apply, that network shares can follow ln -fs symbolic links but not Finder ones, in the context of AFP shares? I recently put some things into /users/shared on my iMac and I'd like them to be accessible to my iBook, but they are not, through the link directories.
I guess I can just go and quickly try to replace the link directories, too.
I checked this out for AFP shares and this doesn't seem to work. Is there a way that I can make the /users/shared folder, for instance, available to an AFP user, aside from using Sharepoints to mount the /users/shared folder directly?
Also P.S. can anyone actually verify this worked for Windows shares? I don't have any Windows devices to check it with.