Built-in Services: The Sharing Panel
Mac OS X includes many built-in services that are based on common open source servers such as Samba, Apache, and OpenSSH. Although you can enable and disable these using the Sharing preference panel (System Preferences → Sharing), there’s not much configuration you can do there. This section describes each of these services and what you can do to customize them to your liking.
Personal File Sharing
This option controls the
AppleTalk Filing Profile
(AFP) service, and corresponds to the AFPSERVER entry in
/etc/hostconfig (see Chapter 2 for more information on
hostconfig
). When you enable Personal File
Sharing, your Mac shares your Home directory and any mounted volumes
(including external drives) with the connected machine.
Windows File Sharing
This option turns on the
Samba service, and toggles the
disable entry in
/etc/xinetd.d/nmbd (NetBIOS name server for
resolving Windows server names) and /etc/xinetd.d/smbd
(the server that handles Windows file sharing).
On Mac OS X, Samba hooks into Open Directory for user
authentication. Because of
this, you don’t need to use
smbpasswd to set the
password for someone
logging into your Mac from a Windows machine; users can authenticate
themselves by using their login username and password.
You can add a new share by editing
/etc/smb.conf
, and adding an entry.
For example, you could share your Applications directory with this
entry:
[Applications] path = /Applications read only = yes
Next, use the command ...
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