[wynn]

Hi List,

I'm trying to connect to a second drive on a dual 1.25ghz mac from a winxp machine. If I connect from my powerbook to the dual 1.25, I can connect fine and get the option of mounting the second drive on my powerbook.

If I try connecting from my pc, I don't get the option of seeing any other drive other than the primary drive. That is, I see: \\192.168.0.XXX\username\ but no sign of any of the connected drives on the machine. I'm new to win-to-mac networking so if anyone could offer some advice, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks much,

Wynn

[Brass]

Are you using SMB to connect in both cases, or are you using AFP for the Mac and SMB for windows?

I haven't tried this myself, but I would guess that with the Windows connection, you might be able to access the second drive by going to /Volumes on the first drive. Ie, connect to the primary drive, then change directory to /Volumes/<second-drive>

In unix, everything is under the one directory tree, and in Mac OS X, additional drives' filesystems are automatically mounted at /Volumes/<volume-name>. It's only a Mac OS X kludge that makes them appear alongside your primary drive.

[wynn]

Hi Brass,

Thanks for the reply. When I connect to the desktop mac, from my powerbook, I connect via afp. Once I connect, I get a dialog box that asks me which volume that I would like to mount.

On my pc, I'm not sure how I'm connecting to the desktop mac (I'm assuming smb, because I'm assuming that you can't use afp to connect from a pc).

Once I connect to the primary drive, I tried going to \volumes, but I get an error. Is there something that I need to activate on the mac to show hidden files/folders?

Thanks again for the help

[Brass]

ah, yes, I'd forgotten about one point there. No, hidden folders should be visible to your Windows machine. I think the problem is that you're connecting to your home directory, not the root directory. This is the only way to do it with Mac OS X's default SAMBA setup.

To connect to anything else with Samba on Mac OS X, you'll need to manually edit the samba configuration file "smb.conf". If you're not sure how to do this, see

man smb.conf

for the manual pages. It can be quite complicated. But the basic thing you'll need to add would be something like:

[other_volumes]
path = /Volumes

OR

[everything]
path = /

There there are hundreds of other options you could add for these share definitions, but I think you can get by with just these minimal ones.

[wynn]

Hi Brass,

Sorry for the delayed reply. I'm about to making the changes that you've suggested, but I just want to make sure that it doesn't compromise the security of the system in any way.

Thanks much,

Wynn

[quadgrande]

Regarding security, SMB basically provides the file sharing interface that Windows uses (Server Message Block IIRC). So sharing your whole hard drive on your Mac is no different from a security standpoint as sharing your hard drive on your PC.

The answer to your security question really depends on your network environment. Are these machines directly connected to the Internet? IF so, I would not share your entire hard drive. You'll open yourself up to a brute force attack on the username and password of your shared drive. If you're behind a firewall or a router that is not port forwarding, I wouldn't worry as much.

In most cases, I think more flexibility leads to higher risk.