06.15.08
What’s wrong with this picture?
Ever since I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5, I’ve been unable to share my 10.5 Mac’s files with any of the other Macs on my local network. This is despite the firewall claiming that AFP is an “allowed service” and happens regardless of whether the firewall is on or off. (My “solution”: continue sharing the disk in my 10.3 Mac, where enabling file sharing Just Works™, and mount that shared volume on the 10.5 Mac.)
By contrast, I joined the second annual Camino Meet-Up remotely yesterday afternoon, and though I’d never used iChat before, all I had to do was open the app and tell Sam my old mac.com username. Poof, there were pink and the gang in San Francisco and Desmond across the pond, all staring back at me and chatting away. No messing with the firewall required.
It’s obvious which task Apple believes is common and therefore optimized. I have no arguments with making video chat completely seamless, either; it’s just that file sharing used to be the same way, from early Mac OS versions all the way up until the arrival of 10.5—why did Apple have to break that?
June 15, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Hi Smokey,
With which versions of Mac OS are you trying to share your files?
In 10.4 and newer versions, AppleTalk is no more supported. See this technote :
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106461#atalk
June 15, 2008 at 6:11 pm
val1984, long time no see
By default Mac OS X does AFP over IP rather than AFP over AppleTalk, and I was trying to connect via an IP-based afp:// URI, so it’s not the issue in that technote. Just to be sure my non-10.5 Macs weren’t trying to initiate AFP connections over AppleTalk (because AppleTalk is enabled for printing to my venerable HP LaserJet 5MP), I turned AT off and checked again. Still no luck.
However, you seemed to have worked some magic with my network gremlins
, because if I set the firewall to either the user-managed list of services or disable it completely, connecting to the 10.5 Mac is suddenly working for the first time in months. I’m not sure what changed, but at least I can share that volume now!
I still think that when I have “Only allow essential services” selected and file sharing enabled, AFP should Just Work™ just like iChat does with that setting, but right now I’m happy just to have it working at all.