OS X & XP Networking

Jayem

The All Seeing
ok, let me break this down for ya'.
I've got a Mac running X.1, and i have a Box running XP. They both access the internet thru a linksys router. I want to set up a "network" , if you will, in order to share music, and movies with my family, as well as play online games with them via lan. I already tried making setting port fowarding for FTP, and a couple of games to redirect the traffic to the G4. The thing is.... its f*ing annoying only beeing able to upload to the G4 from the P4. Besides im not so crazy of even having to use FTP software to do this... is there anyway I can make it so that XP is recognized by X.1 as a network disk on the same lan, and vice virsa?
 
Why Pay when you can do it free and legal the Unix way??

Samba is a powerful networking Unix app that lets your *nix box act as a computer in a Windows network.

OS X includes half of samba, so you can connect to windows shares via the PC's network name or IP address, but the full Samba lets you share "shares" on your Mac HD and have them accessable by your Win machine.

For the latest and greatest Mac OS X build (now in a fool-proof OS X installer) check out Xamba, at http://xamba.sourceforge.net. I've used this latest version on X.1 and it works great. I also used the regular *nix version back in the OS X Public Beta days, and it worked great then, too!
 
x.1 already can see your windows XP shares.

Have finder as the front app, choose the go menu and connect to server. type smb://computername/sharename

ie: my xp machine is named 'Nitro' (the tech did it not me), and I have a couple of shared folders on it, one being my RTCW folder.

so to connect to this folder (or share) I just type smb://nitro/rtcw. It pops up a log in window and I can enter workgroup (usually unnecessary), my login name and password to access the share (usually any name will do as long as you have the password, if required, to get into the share folder).

IF you got it right, passwords and all then it will mount right to your desktop as a little hard drive. Drag and drop just like you would any other folder or idisk.

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As posted above, you can also get the free full Samba program for X (xamba) which goes the next step and lets you set up shares on your osX box just as you do in XP, designating folders as shares and giving them password access etc. With Xamba server running you can then see your osX shares in the network neighbourhood just dandy.
 
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