File Sharing Services
Mac OS X’s native file-sharing method is the Apple Filing Protocol ( AFP). As with related technologies such as SMB and NFS (see Section 10.4 in Chapter 10), 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 8.2.1 in Chapter 8. The program stores its configuration
information (including the location of log files, whether it allows
Guest access, and so on) in the
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AppleFileServer.plist
file.
Toggling this checkbox in the Sharing pane also modifies the
AFPSERVER
line in
/etc/hostconfig
, read by the startup script
/System/Library /StartupItems/AppleShare/AppleShare
(see the next section).
The AFP server handles user authentication through Directory Services, in most cases referring to NetInfo for the list of volumes it’s allowed to provide to the requesting user. This list, of course, varies depending on the type of account that user has on the server.
Users with no accounts can log in as Guest and are allowed only to mount the Public directories ...
Get Mac OS X Panther in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.