Mike Ryan

I needed to establish backups. I have a 300GB external hard drive - but it was formatted with NTFS (thus unwritable by Mac OS X), and it contained many, many GB of music files. I had already imported the MP3s into iTunes on my MacBook, but Sarah has been using the external drive to sync her MP3 player through her Windows laptop (using MediaMonkey, a much better music library manager than iTunes, but which unfortunately won't sync to my iPhone). It would also be good to make it easy for her to backup to the external drive as well, and there's a file or two we'd like to share. The initial plan was to reformat as FAT32 and pass the USB cable back-and-forth, but FAT32 can only handle up to a 127GB partition. So, the plan changed to semi-permanently mounting the external drive on my MacBook - and, while I'm at it, sharing the music files directly from my iTunes Library rather than having them duplicated on the external drive (particularly since Time Machine is backing them up there anyway).

Note we have cable Internet through a wireless router, both computers link to the router directly.

So, the whole process - at least as best as I can reconstruct what I would have done if I'd known what I was doing, instead of struggling through trial-and-error-and-semi-helpful-forum-posts...

1. Plug the drive into the MacBook, and reformat (through Disk Utility) as Mac OS Extended (journaled).
2. Create a folder named Shared on the external drive. Two reasons not to share the drive from the root - don't want to share the Time Machine backups, and when sharing the root No Access does not seem to available as an option for Everyone (but it is available for the Shared folder). In Shared, create an alias Shared Music to point to the iTunes library folder. Create the SarahBackups folder, for the obvious purpose. Copy files to be shared into Shared.
3. In System Preferences->Network, with AirPort selected click Advanced... Click the WINS tab, and enter MSHOME as the Workgroup (I tried using a custom workgroup, but the Windows system keeps defaulting back to MSHOME).
4. In System Preferences->Sharing, check on File Sharing. Under Shared Folders, click the plus  (+) button and choose the Shared folder. Under Users, change Everyone to No Access. Select Guests and click the minus (-) button to remove. Click the plus (+) button to add users (me and Sarah) permitted remote access (Read & Write).
5. Click Options... and select Share files and folders using SMB. Select the accounts which can log in to the share.
6. On the Windows system, from Control Panel and go through the Network Setup Wizard:
   1. Yes, use the existing shared connection for this computer's Internet access.
   2. Description/name already filled in
   3. Workgroup name: MSHOME
   4. Turn off file and printer sharing (don't want to share anything from this machine).
7. Now, here's the part I was missing (and it's quite likely step 6 would have been unnecessary if I had tried this first) - go to Start->Run and enter \\w.x.y.z\ (where w.x.y.z is the IP address you see in the Mac Sharing System Preferences). Click OK.
8. A username/password prompt comes up - login using your Mac shortname and password. You get an Explorer window with - well, everything accessible to your account on the Mac, it seems... You can now right-click on the share and map it to a drive letter.

Now, at this point it turns out the alias to my iTunes folder (created in Finder with Make Alias) shows up on the Windows side as a 0kb file instead of a folder. Going to the shell, ls -l shows the attributes as -rw----r--@ (@ indicating extended attributes). I created a symbolic link from the shell (resulting attributes lrwxr-xr-x) - that seemed to do the trick.

Next, see about sharing the printer...