Mac OS X in a Nutshell

File Sharing Services

Mac OS X’s native file-sharing method is the Apple Filing Protocol ( AFP). As with related technologies like SMB and NFS (see Section 11.4), it lets users of other computers (often, but not necessarily, other Macs) mount volumes of your local filesystem onto their own.

Both the command-line and GUI interfaces for administering AFP are very simple. To turn on AFP, activate the Personal File Sharing checkbox in the Sharing preference pane’s Services tab. This simply launches the AppleFileServer daemon (which resides in /usr/sbin). AppleFileServer takes no arguments; it makes all your machine’s volumes and User folders available for mounting on other computers, as described in Section 7.2.1. The program keeps its configuration information (including the location of log files, whether it allows Guest access, and so on) under the NetInfo database’s /config/AppleFileServer directory.

Toggling this checkbox in the Sharing pane also modifies the AFPSERVER line in /etc/hostconfig, read by the startup script /System/Library/StartupItems/AppleShare/AppleSahre (see the next section).

The AFP server handles user authentication through NetInfo, just like Mac OS X generally does when handling user logins. When working with a mounted volume, that disk’s permission system applies just as if that same user were logged into the machine and accessing the filesystem directly. If a user mounts a volume as Guest (and the server is set to allow Guest access), then the server grants ...