Networking Your Computers Drives/Folders

Hey guys, this is Mids on one, and today I'm going to be showing you how to access any computer on your network's file system over a protocol I like to call Samba. It's spelled SMB, and, um, it can also be spelled another way, but, um, I'm not going to be spelling it that way. But whatever, so here we go.

I'm going to first explain that Samba is based off of—it's like the standard way of using networking file systems over networks. Um, Samba is a secure way of doing things, so you can make it either needing authentication or you can give guests specific privileges on a Samba server. Different drives can be accessible over Samba, and another thing is that Samba—you must be an administrator to enable Samba.

So, let's just go right into it. First, I'm going to go onto my desktop computer and enable Samba on that, and then I'll connect to it from this computer and go from there. Okay, so now I'm on my desktop. So, I'll just open up my system preferences. And since, like I said, you want to be enabling a Samba server, you go into system preferences, and you need to be an administrator to enable this, by the way.

And I'll go into sharing, and you want to click the lock to unlock if it's not already unlocked. And then for file sharing, you just check that off. So now you can see right here it says under share folders, Alex n's public folder because that's my username on this computer, and Scott Nichols' public folder.

So right here I can click add to add another folder that can be accessed. Maybe I'll make a folder on my desktop that says "access," and I'll select that. And by the way, I just clicked add right here. So now if I say access, I can say Alex n can read and write, all the users on the computer can read only, and everyone, even guests, I'll make it so they can read only, and I'll make all the users be able to read and write, and I'll make myself read and write too.

So now I've selected access, and so now anyone with a user on this computer will be able to remotely connect and read and write to this folder on my desktop. And like I said before, you need to be on the same network to do this. You can also do this with your entire home folder. You just click add, select your home folder, click add, and then right there you say you're the only one who can read and write, everyone else can maybe read only and no access.

Okay, there we go. So this is, you can also select options to set up more stuff. And when we click options, share files and folders using AFP is good, but we also want to check share files and folders using Samba or SMB. Now you want to say, let me just read this to you: when you enable SMB sharing for a user account, you must enter the password for the account. Sharing with Samba stores this password in a less secure manner, so it doesn't really encrypt your password as much.

So yeah, but I'm still going to allow my user. I need to type my user and password so that anyone with my username can connect, and I'll enable it for my dad's user as well. So now my dad and I have permissions to connect to this computer remotely and using Samba, not just AFP. So this is that you can also click add to add another user to the access, and I'll make administrators be able to write only to my home folder.

So now I'm going to be connecting to this computer on my computer. Okay, so once that is done, you just want to open up a new finder window, and now it'll appear under Share, and then you can click connect as. Okay, and now I can access all the folders that Alex n has access to. I set it so I can access access, and here it looks like a real mounted drive, so I can edit files on my desktop from my laptop.

So I don't really have any good files on this user because it's just my video user. Let's see if I can find a... yeah, I'll just drag this up. So now it's copied this file over the network to my desktop computer. So I'll eject this under sharing. There's another way to connect in case it doesn't show up under there. You want to go up to Go, Connect to Server, click Browse Server, should show up right here.

We'll open that up, and then you can click connect as. You can also type smb:// and the IP address. I don't actually know the IP, so that's too bad. Let's see, I can't get it through here—too bad. So that is how to wirelessly access files on a laptop computer or a desktop computer on your network that you have administrator access on.

And the only reason I'm making this video is because I recently—or I figured this out when I first got my computer, and I figured I might as well share it with the world, um, just because I can. So hope you enjoy this; maybe you'll do this if you have two computers in your house. Um, and goodbye!