[fmalloy]

Hi,

I don't have OS 9 yet (its not due to ship from Outpost until the 23rd, so I don't know how you all have it), and I have a question about multiple users - will each user have their own folders and files? How does each user hide/reveal folders/files?

Any info on this would be helpful.

Don't worry each user will have their own folders and files whenever they start up. The finder remember all the pref and files that is on the computer. There is a menu you can add which application you can allow the user to see and used it or even hide it. Don't worry it is really easy, once you get the MacOS 9 you be getting it in about a weeks.

Hope that help.
Good Luck!

[Mithras]

The multiple users feature works like this:

• It's long been true of the Mac OS that you could have more than one system folder on a disk. Thus you could have different system folders with different versions, or different preferences, on the same disk. The active system folder was "blessed", i.e. it was specially designated by the system as the System Folder, regardless of its name, etc. You could see which folder was so blessed because the blessed system folder would acquire the special icons of System Folder, Apple Menu Items, etc.

Applications ask the Finder for the active Preferences folder, etc, and thus receive a location that may or may not have had the path "System Folderreferences".

• What OS 9 does is make a special "Users" folder at the root level of the startup disk. In this folder it keeps one folder for each user of the computer: "Joe", "Bob", etc.

• In this folder, it keeps copies of Apple Menu Items, Preferences, and so on. When you log in, your Preferences folder, Apple menu items, and so on are "blessed": thus, applications look in your special folder, rather than the System Folder of the disk.

Some weird variation on File Sharing access controls keeps you, or any program you run, from looking at other users' folders.


This is my question on this topic:

Is it possible to link the Users folder to another disk?

I like to keep documents and applications on a separate disk from the system software, to make crashes less dangerous and recovery easier. But, OS 9 keeps the magic "Documents" folder inside of the startup disk; and trying to install an alias to a folder on another disk loses the access control abilities...

Any ideas whether you can make the Users folder or the Documents folder an alias to a folder on another disk?

[dbergstrom]

Thanks for the good explanation of multiple users.

Here's an answer to your question:

When you enable Multiple Users, a "Users" folder is placed on each hard drive in the system. You can then drag a folder consisting of each user's files into the their folder in the Users folder.

For my system, we have about 12 users, with one disk being data and the other applications (start-up disk). The "Users" file on the applications disk contains each user's preferences, desktop folder, etc. On the data disk, I put each user's data into the Users folder. I then put an alias to each user's data folder into that user's Desktop folder on the applications disk.

When a user logs on and double-clicks on the data disk, the only folder which appears in the "Users" folder is their own.

Note that Multiple Users is NOT integrated with the file sharing "Users and Groups" log-on system. Any user of a system can log on from a remote location and access the entire hard drive, even if they do not have "owner" status for the system. Therefore, if security is really an issue, I would recommend using the OS9 encryption to protect sensitive files.

P.S. File sharing via TCP/IP works great and is FAST (at least 2X faster than AppleTalk over a 10BaseT network).

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Don