Ted Landau
January 2007
The Accounts System Preferences pane may not be the most glamorous destination in Mac OS X, but it’s definitely worth a stopover in Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5). Check it out and you’ll find a collection of valuable new features. To take advantage of these features, you also want to familiarize yourself with some new options in the File Sharing section of the Sharing System Preferences pane. What all these features are and how to use them is the subject of this tutorial.
Part A: Accounts System Preferences Pane
Guest Invitations. After arriving at Accounts, start by checking out the new Guest Account listing (Figure 1). A guest is anyone who is permitted limited access to your computer, without the need for a password. Leopard provides two quite different methods for guest access.
Figure 1. The Guest Account option in the Accounts System Preferences pane.
Access folders as a guest. To set up the first type of guest access, select the Guest Account item and enable the checkbox for “Allow guests to connect to shared folders” (first clicking the Lock icon to authenticate that you are an Admin user, if needed). This access provides a convenient way to make files available “for pickup” by friends and colleagues—or to allow them to drop off files for you.
This type of guest access was available in Tiger. However, it provided access only to the Public folder in your Home directory. New in Leopard, the contents of any folder(s) on your computer can be designated as “shared” so as to be accessible to guests over a network (see Sharing with Others, later in this article, for details).
Assuming you have enabled File Sharing, the name of your Mac appears in the Shared section of the sidebars of Finder windows on all other Macs (running Leopard) on your local network. All another user has to do is click the name of your Mac and they will be automatically connected as a guest. Tiger users on your local network can similarly connect to your Mac by selecting the Network item in the sidebar and clicking the name of your Mac in the window.
For remote connections, users use the Connect to Server command (in the Finder’s Go menu) and enter the appropriate afp address. Unless you are using a router, this is the address listed in the Sharing System Preferences pane when you select the File Sharing option (if you are using a router, determining the correct address is more involved and is a subject for another article).
Login as a guest. Having guest access to shared folders is fine for connecting over a network. But what if you have a friend visiting you and they want to use your computer to surf the Web or check their email? You could simply let them login to your account, but this could give them access to information that you might prefer to keep off limits. You could set up a separate Standard account for them (as could also be done in Tiger), but this may still be less than ideal if you expect multiple people to be using the account. Leopard provides a new and better alternative: the Guest Account.
Anyone can log in to a Guest Account; no password is needed. Unlike with any other type of account, after logging out, all changes made to the Guest Account are deleted, leaving the account in its initial pristine condition for the next guest who comes along.
To user this feature, return to the Guest Account item in the Account pane and enable the “Allow guests to log into this computer" option. This adds Guest Account to the list of users that appears in the Login window. Just click it and you are logged into the account.
For an “extended stay” guest who will be using your computer over several days, a standard account may be the better choice (as such guests may wish to preserve files and settings over the length of their stay). But for brief drop-ins, the Guest Account is perfect.
Sharing Only. Guest Accounts are only one of several new types of accounts in Leopard. To find the others, click the + button at the bottom of the Accounts list. This drops down a sheet for adding a new account (Figure 2). Select the New Account popup menu to see the list of account options.
Figure 2. New Accounts options in Leopard.
New in Leopard is a Sharing Only account. This type of account is very similar to having guest access to shared folders. That is, a Sharing Only account is only usable over a network (you can’t login to it from a Mac’s Login window) and users have access only to folders you designate to be shared.
The key difference is that you can create any number of Sharing Only accounts, each with its own password and with differing access to specific folders. For example, you could create a Sharing Only account for your friend Helen, and give her Read & Write access to a folder named For Helen, while your friend Troy is given a separate Sharing Only account with similar access to a different folder named For Troy.
Once you have set up each Sharing Only account, exactly what access the account has is determined by settings in the Sharing System Preferences pane (as explained in Sharing with Others, later in this article).
Groups. Suppose you are working with a group of people, all on your local network, and you want them all to have the same access to a collection of files for a common project? You can easily do this in Leopard. Your first step is to create a Sharing Only account for each user.
Your next step could be to separately set up the desired access for each newly-created account. But this could be a time-wasting hassle, especially if you intend to make periodic and similar changes to each account's access over the course of the project. Leopard offers a better solution: Groups.
To set this up, you once again start by clicking the + button in the Accounts System Preferences pane. From the New Account pop-up menu, select Group and give the group a name.
The group is now listed in the Groups section of the Accounts list. Select it and enable the checkbox for each user you wish to be a part of the group (Figure 3). Groups access is not limited to Sharing Only accounts. Any account can be included.
Figure 3. Working: A Group item in the Accounts System Preferences pane.
At any later time, you can add or delete accounts from the group membership by returning to its Group account listing and enabling or disabling individual account name(s).
To assign exactly what access members of a group have, you need to return to the Sharing System Preferences pane (as again explained in Sharing with Others).
Having set all of this up, a change to the group’s access for a shared folder (such as from Read Only to Read & Write) instantly changes the access for all members of the group. This is much more convenient than having to separately make the same change to multiple accounts. Similarly, you can add or delete a person from the group at any time.
Advanced Options. There’s one more significant new feature in the Accounts System Preferences pane. To find it, access the contextual menu for an account (by Control-clicking on the account name) and select the Advanced Options… item that appears. A sheet drops down (Figure 4) from which you can change various settings for the selected account, such as the name of and ID number for the account.
Figure 4. The Advanced Options in the Accounts System Preferences pane.
By hiding these options via the contextual menu, Apple is saying: “Keep out unless you know what you are doing. Otherwise, you can cause more harm than good.” That said, there are times that you may find it handy to be able to make a change here.
The option you will likely find of most interest is the one to change the short name of an account. Tiger offered no Apple-supported way to do this, other than a complicated procedure that most users would not want to tackle. The Accounts’ Advanced Options in Leopard allows you to make this change in one easy step! To have a new name take effect, restart your Mac.
Part B: Sharing with Others
In Part A of this article, I indicated that you could separately set access for each shared folder in Leopard. The Sharing System Preferences pane is where you do this (Figure 5).
Figure 5. The File Sharing option in the Sharing System Preferences pane.
Guest access. In order for a guest to have access to folders on your computer, you first have to turn on file sharing. To do this, go to the Sharing System Preferences pane, and enable the On checkbox for File Sharing. That’s it.
By default, guests now have access to the Public folder in your home directory (as well as the Drop Box inside the Public folder). This type of guest access has been an option in versions of Mac OS X prior to Leopard.
Where Leopard stakes out new territory is in its ability for guests to share any folders on your hard drive, not just the Public folder. To enable a selected folder for sharing:
- Select File Sharing in the Sharing System Preferences pane.
- Click the + button at the bottom of the Shared Folders list. A sheet drops down from which you can navigate to and select any folder on your drive. Select the desired folder.
- Shift to the Users column and set the access for “Everyone” via its popup menu (this is what determines access for guests). For example, if you want guests to be able to modify the contents of the selected folder, change Read Only to Read & Write.
Now, whenever a user connects as a Guest, they have your designated access to the assigned folder(s).
All other access. To similarly provide access for Sharing Only accounts, Groups, or any other account that you designate, the procedure is almost the same as for Guest access.
- Select a folder to be shared, as just described for Guest access.
- Click the + button at the bottom of the Users section. From the Users & Groups section of the sheet that drops down, select the desired Sharing Only account, regular account and/or Group name.
If you instead select a name from the Address Book listing, you will be prompted to enter a password. Doing this creates a Sharing Only account for that name on the fly.
- Click the Select button. The person or group is added to the list of users who can access the folder. Read Only access is assigned by default. But you can change this via the popup menu.
- At this point, you may also want to modify the other default access settings. For example, Everyone is set to Read Only access by default. If you want the contents of the folder to be restricted to only those in a specific group, change the Everyone setting to No Access.
Having done all of this, you are now ready to enjoy a level of control over who can share your files—and to what extent they can share them—that far exceeds what was possible from the Accounts and Sharing preferences panes in Tiger!
Tutorials
