USERS & GROUPS

mbay

Registered
Hello everyone,

I am new to Panther. I am reading the manual, but I have trouble with the "file sharing" premise.

In Classic, in the "File Sharing" menu, there was a "Users & Groups" tab. Inside this tab, one could press the "New User" button, and go about creating a user for file sharing purposes only; thus choosing this unique user and associate to a particular folder so that a person on the same network may access this folder only.

Now with Panther, there is the "Accounts" option, but to my belief, it creates an account for the OS and not the file sharing aspect of it.

Is there a way, in Panther, to add a new user such as in Classic for file sharing purposes only? Perhaps it's been renamed?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

mbay
 
Well, not easily with the Client version, unless you like fussing around with config files and are comfortable using the UNIX Terminal.

What you're describing is a client-server setup, and is easily configurable with Mac OS X Server -- however, this ease-of-setup feature is lacking in the client version.
 
Thank you for your quick reply.

I'll just have to use classic for that operation in the meantine. The server edition is quite costly.

Thank you again.

mbay
 
If you just want to create privelleges for individual items you can set the file or folder's privelleges with "Get Info".
 
OS X is much better at file sharing than OS 9

It does work differently and permissions can be more a a pain than a help - particularly in a workgroup environment - but being UNIX under everything you can tinker away and sort things out.

It wouldn't hurt to set up a new user on your machine - a standard (non-admin) account is the default and should be fine. You don't need to worry about it being very big (24KB) or difficult to set up and it's now a sinch to vapourise the account if you don't want it.

The main difference is that the new user's home folder is set in the Users folder (not anywhere you want) and that that user logs in they will have the option to mount the Public folder of any account (and see the username - which you may not want). This should be fixed by modifying [your] home folder's permissions to exclude everybody else - as Nat' said.

Then there's fun things like changing the umask settings so different accounts can actually work in collaboration on the same file (although hopefully not at the same time - unless you like that kind of thing). It seems easy but I havn't done it...

Oh yes - have a look for a shareware app called SharePoints at versiontracker.com - it might help

Anyway have a go and try it out on a dummy account.

Gabs
 
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