john1123 said:
i want to share my public folder to my brother. he has a windows box and i have an ibook.
The problem is that the only way i have found to do any windows-mac file sharing is by giving him my password and share my whole home folder with him. I only want him to access my public folder.
Any ideas?
There are a few options. You can set up an FTP server using the public folder as the source and run it that way, without a password if you so desire. The network file-sharing method of choice, however, is to create a limited user account and give him the username and password of that account (it MUST have a password because of the way authentication and permissions work with Windows and the Mac). You don't actually have to log into it; just move the contents of your public folder over to the new user's public folder. That way, you can both access the files. When I needed to do this, I limited the account (which I called just "networkuser," but "guest" would have probably sufficed) to have access privileges to no applications, enabled simple Finder, and all that so that even if someone were to get in, they couldn't do anything.
The reason you need a username and password is because the networking setup on OS X is permissions-based, and therefore you need to identify yourself in order to evaluate the permissions and gain access. In actuality, it's much more complicated than that (believe me, it's a real headache getting Samba and Windows to play nice in many cases), but that's the short reason why there is no anonymous access to your hard drive.
There are also more complicated methods of getting things done, but I find the above two to be sufficient for almost any purpose. Hope this helps!
