Mac OS X Shared Folders

I have had a lot of troubles getting Mac OS X "Shared Folders" to behave the way I want.  This page is for notes on things I have figured out.

Issue: Users connecting to a Shared Folder as Guest cannot even browse subfolders of the shared folder.

Resolution: It turns out that in order for someone connected to a Shared Folder as Guest to be able to browse a subfolder the subfolder has to have the eXecute permission set for Others, i.e. when you run ls -l on the shared folder the subfolder permissions should look like this:

drwx---rwx 11 ownersname groupname 12 Dec 30 06:19 My Subfolder

with the important one being the last x.  If the last permission is not x, then non-authenticated users will not be able to even browse the subfolder.

In order to set all permissions on all subfolders to allow Guest access I ran this from Terminal:

chmod -R o=rwx /SharedFolderPath

This recursively goes through every subfolder and file under /SharedFolderPath and sets permissions for "others" (aka everyone) to read, write, and execute. I am sure there are all kinds of security issues with this, but this is a machine behind a firewall on a home network so I think I don't care.

Lessons learned from doing my own 2009 income taxes on Mac OS X

IRS PDF forms are "fillable" meaning you fill in values on screen and then save the form with the values you entered.

The IRS PDF forms do not format completely correctly if you use Mac OS X Preview (for example social security numbers are all bunched together instead of being spread out like the form intends), so the best bet is to just use Adobe Reader.

Once you open an IRS PDF form in Preview and then save it you can no longer open it in Adobe Reader in fillable format; it will tell you that you cannot save your changes.  So it is best to just use Adobe Reader from the outset on IRS PDF forms.

The Arizona PDF 140 form has its permissions set so that you cannot save the form with the values you entered.  However, if you open this form using the Foxit Reader instead of Adobe Reader you can save the form with your input.

Unfortunately, the Foxit Reader cannot print the saved form with the barcode on the front page which encodes all your input.

Fortunately, you can use Adobe Reader to open a form with saved values that you saved using Foxit Reader and then print it with the barcode on the front page.