Accessing a Firewire Drive on OSX from WinME

[BrianMalcolm]

sorry if this has been asked before... i did look around and saw nothing that would help me...

we've just set up a mac running osX here at work... all of our computers are macs, save one computer running windows ME... we're using an external firewire hard drive as our file server, which is no problem whatsoever for our mac users (obviously)... however, when our windows user logs on (by typing "//IP.ADD.RE.SS/username" in the "run" box), she can only get to the "home" folder... the files she needs to get to are on the external firewire drive... i tried making an alias to the drive and putting it in the home folder, but windows just sees it as a generic file and doesn't know what to do with it...

any ideas? need more info as to how it's set up?

thanks in advance...

 

[symphonix]

In the meantime use FTP. Its an easy solution but not a great one. At least it'll get you access to the files while we work out the next solution.
Just turn on the FTP access in Sharing preferences, then on the Windows ME machine open an explorer window and point it to ftp://username@yourmacsipaddress/
you should be prompted for a password.

As for fixing the windows networking so you can access an external drive, try reconfiguring by editing /etc/smb.conf. You can find the documentation at http://www.samba.org/

You might also try out making an alias to that volume in the user's home directory on the mac, and see if it can be followed from the Win machine. Its worth a shot.

 

[BrianMalcolm]

thanks so much... i never even thought of using FTP as a temp solution (the one person on a PC only accesses a few production files a day, so that'd be no big deal)...

i ended up installing "sambaserve" (i think) and that seems to be running quite flawlessly... it's pretty intuitive, and seems to have all the features we need... also, it's still a beta version, and if anyone wants a link, i can post it on monday (the pages i found are in my bookmarks at work)...

edit: also, putting an alias of the drive (or even folders within the drive) didn't work... that was the first thing i tried, and it came up as a generic file of some sort on the PCs...