Clueless on Xp - Mac leopard sharing

[Chillisauce]

Hi all,

Not very good with computers so here goes.

I want to connect my Mac leopard OS to share file from/to my XP PC.

My PC is connected to a modem router by ethernet cable, whilst my Mac is connect to the internet through Airport.

My friend said to ping the address on PC and the Mac which I did and can ping my PC IP:192.168.2.3 and MAC: 192.168.2.2

But no matter what I have tried cannot see PC or the Mac from either direction.

I have tried most of the suggestion I can find but none of the work..

ANy help would be most welcome.

[Eiríkr]

Hello Chillisauce --

You need to have sharing set up on either or both of the Windows and Mac machines; sharing doesn't just happen automatically. On Windows XP, select the folder you want to share, right-click it, select Sharing and Security, click the Share This Folder radio button, click the Permissions button and figure out what username has access, and click OK a bunch of times. (You might need to reboot XP at this point, I'm not sure.) Now the Windows workgroup name (found by right-clicking on My Computer in XP) should show up on your Mac in the Network section of the Finder. Inside this should be the name of your Windows machine, and clicking this will show you a login dialog -- use the username (and appropriate password) you saw in the Permissions section of setting up your share on XP.

HTH,

Eiríkr

[fmavolio]

Well, ever since installing Leopard what is displayed under Network changes seemingly randomly. Although under the System Preferences/Network/Ethernet/Advanced/WINS I have the same workgroup name as the windows machines, sometimes the whole network shows up in Network and on the Sidebar of Finder -- never the workgroup name.

See http://www.avolio.com/pics/shared.jpg

And right now no systems are showing up, although I can connect via smb to the other systems and via nfs to the linux system.

What's with the flakiness?

Thanks.

-Fred

[Eiríkr]

As best as I can figure, it seems to do with how Apple's automount daemon defines paths. If I've got both Bonjour-advertised NFS and Samba recognized by my iBook, then I get Workgroup and My Network folders within the Network folder itself, with my NFS shares showing up in My Network. If Samba isn't running or isn't recognized (see below), my NFS shares show up directly in Network, and the My Network sub-folder disappears.

I've discovered that entering in my workgroup name all in lower case causes the workgroup to disappear altogether from my Network view, for some bizarre reason -- but only on my Intel iBook. And no matter what I do, this machine *will not* show any SMB machines in the workgroup folder. My much older PowerPC iBook exhibits neither problem, despite both Macs ostensibly having the same software versions (10.4.11) and same workgroup membership. I can still access Samba shares from the wonky iBook, I just have to use the "Connect to server" or Apple-K route and specify the machine name. Very strange.

And somewhat more annoyingly, sometimes on the newer iBook when the Samba workgroup is missing, the NFS shares simply vanish from the GUI -- I have to use the CLI to access them.

"Flakiness" seems to be the right choice of word. Only I don't remember going in for a pie crust... :-|

[mvcube]

I prefer the manual way, i. e. Apple-K on the Mac or even the command line on Windows (net share x: \\ip_of_mac\share). To make things easier, don't rely on ethernet braodcasting and add the ip adresses of each machine to the respective hosts files (/etc/hosts on the Mac and C:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows). The problem: On the mac you will need to use the shell and start sudo vi /etc/hosts to edit the file.)

It is neccessary to enable sharing on both sides and allow the firewall to let the networking protocols pass.