[pendragon]

I have Personal File Sharing enabled in 10.3.2. And for my home network (Airport), it works great. But I just noticed that when I restart, this service is no longer enabled and I must re-enable it. (I seldom need to restart so this may have been occurring for quite some time.) This condition is even true when Sharing is locked. At the next restart, the lock is reopened and sharing is no longer active.

Maybe this condition has always been that way and I have just missed it. Does anyone know if that is the normal condition? If not, any suggestions re what I can do to remedy the situation? FWIW, I Repaired Permissions, and DiskWarrior & Repair Disk both indicate no problems.

Many thanks!

[absmiths]

I would check the console logs. I had a problem like this with Internet Sharing in 10.3 and it turned out there were messages in the console log which explained my problem.

[pendragon]

Thanks absmiths,

I looked at the console log and saw nothing unusual, but then I lack the expertise to really appreciate what lies therein.

As an experiment, I checked to see if that sharing condition also exists on a different drive. And yes it does! I keep the two drives much the same, so if I installed some software that is causing this, it is reasonable to expect a similar result. But if the problem is a result of corruption or some such, then the likelihood of an identical problem is remote. Or so it seems to me.

Of late, I have installed the latest Security update, an Airport update, and MenuMaster. Perhaps one of these is at the heart of the matter.

[proton]

I believe that the Personal File Sharing in 10.3 does not start at startup (and hence disables itself) if there is no network connection active when it attempts to start. If you're using an AirPort network, it may well not have connected at the time that Personal File Sharing would start on boot.

You may want to check that what I said is correct (I'm going from memory), and if it is submit feedback to Apple, telling them you want it to just start when a network connection becomes available in that case.

- proton

[-Q-]

I just restarted my powerbook and, after restarting again b/c it got a kernel panic (!) while booting, file sharing is on and working fine. I then yanked my network cable (no airport at work) to test the 'no network, no filesharing' suggestion and Proton is correct - file sharing is now off. I'm betting your file sharing problem is related to that.

[pendragon]

To close this out--the short version:

There is a known issue where Personal File Sharing stops when it is not connected to a network, Apple Knowledge Base Document 107367.

In my case, I had my System Preferences/Network, Airport, configured to: By Default Join: "Automatic."

So when I restarted, file sharing stopped because a defined/specific network could not be found (the automatic ain't really that automatic). Ergo, the solution was making the change to: "By Default Join a specific (Pendragon) network."

Thanks again to all who offered their time and counsel.