I'm confused - Shared Systems

[unixfool]

I've no idea where I need to post this or how to search for this (can't nail down the words to search on)...

I've been a Mac owner since the summer of 2007. I bought a Macbook then. I now have the Macbook, the wife has a Macbook, and I recently purchased an iMac.

I'm giving MobileMe a try by being a trial user, but even before then, I've been seeing other systems under "Shared" in the left-hand pane in Finder. These shared systems are not my friends or acquaintances. Why are they showing?

Today, I'm on a short vacation and noticed a new system. I got curious (I'll explain that in a bit) and browsed the system. I can see more than I probably should...I can see all of this person's music and he has almost 1TB worth (!!). I stopped there so that I wouldn't intrude further, but the biggest concern for me is my system...can people see mine like that? Is it shared to the world or to whoever is using this public WLAN? How can I tell if people are seeing my system as shared?

Another concern is that I can see my iMac from home and can access the drive directly. That's a huge concern, as my firewall/router is pretty tight...I didn't directly configure the firewall to allow this traffic, so I shouldn't be seeing my iMac from where I'm at. I was assuming that the current share (the other machine that isn't owned by me) was on the wireless network that I'm on but now I'm thinking that he isn't, since I can see my iMac.

So, is this because of MobileMe or something entirely different?

I hope my confusion in all this doesn't hamper any potential response posts, but its a little bit difficult to explain all of this since this is a new aspect of OS X for me.

 

[JNB]

Depending on a lot of factors (mostly open networks), this is something that you'll see quite often. You ought to see the lists I display on hotel networks. As far as your machines being exposed to the outside, we need a little more info, like your network setup at home, are you using Back to My Mac, and so on. If you don't have sharing turned on though, no real need to worry, you're not exposed.

Look here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1549
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/9057.html

Peruse those and other related articles. Also, try MRoogle for searching here, as this is a fairly misunderstood feature to newer Mac users (10.5 & above) once they get on networks (other than the usual Internet stuff).

C'mon back for more questions if those links don't help any.

 

[unixfool]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

I read up on those two links. I think I found the issue. I was allowing read-only for everyone. I turned it off and I can no longer see other shares (although that's kinda backward). I'm gonna assume that they can't see me either.



Thanks!

 

[unixfool]

Duplicate...killed.