Thursday, February 22, 2007

Odd OS X bug: can't share the shared folder

There's a longstanding and mysteriously ignored flaw in OS X File Sharing.

If I connect to one of my Macs using afp, I can browse all the folders belonging to the user I've connected as. I cannot, however, browse the shared folder -- as any user!

I wonder why this only annoys me ...

Update 4/14/07
: I thought I knew a fix for this, but I was fooled. If you create an alias to the Shared directory and put it in your home directory, it looks like a remote client can get to it. Wrong, OS X simply redirects to the local shared directory!

I wonder again why I'm the only person who seems to notice this ....

Update 4/15/07: I've been looking at this from a few angles, and this is a real wart. My guess is that the Shared folder is a kind of kludge that was stuck into the OS as a temporizing measure. There's no standard way in OS X (non-server) to create a network share that everyone can access! The one folder available for local shares is not network accessible! (Insert more exclamation marks.) Grrr.

See also: the Parents folder.

Update 9/3/08: This was fixed in 10.5

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is one of the many reasons (which also include the entire desktop metaphor used by Finder and the Dock) I found OS X so annoying I went back to Windows. Currently using Vista and so happy I don't have to use OS X on a daily basis.

JGF said...

The sharing design flaw was fixed in 10.5.

I use XP and OS X very often, and I much prefer OS X -- though some XP apps are very fine (Chrome, Windows Live Writer).

I have not used Vista.