2010-04-30

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.