Mac OS® X Leopard™ For Dummies®

Chapter 15. Sharing Your Mac and Liking It

In This Chapter

• Comprehending sharing

• Knowing what's up with networks

• Setting up file sharing

• Finding out about users

• Understanding access and permissions

• Sharing files, folders, and disks with other users

• Sharing remotely

Have you ever wanted to grab a file from your Mac while you were halfway around the world or even around the corner? If so, I have good news for you: It's not difficult with Mac OS X (believe it or not), even though computer networking in general has a well‐deserved reputation for being complicated and nerve‐wracking. The truth is that you won't encounter anything scary or complicated about sharing files, folders, and disks (and printers, for that matter) among computers as long as the computers are Macintoshes. And if some of the computers are running Windows, Mac OS X Leopard even makes that (almost) painless. Your Macintosh includes everything that you need to share files and printers — everything, that is, except the printers and the cables (and maybe a hub). So here's the deal: You supply the hardware, and this chapter supplies the rest. And when you're done hooking it all up, you can take a rest.

The first sections of this chapter provide an overview and tell you everything that you need to know to set up new user accounts and share files successfully. I don't show you how to actually share a file, folder, or disk until the Connecting to a Shared Disk or Folder on a Remote Mac section later in this chapter. Trust me, there's ...