How to share an external USB drive over network in OS X?

Question

I have an external USB drive mounted on my Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" box. I want to share a folder on this volume to another OS X computer over LAN. How is it possbile? If I simply enable the built-in File Sharing service and share the directory (using the AFP protocol), it won't be accessible on the other computer.

Answer 1

I googled a bit and I found this. A forum talking about sharing a USB drive over network.

Hope this will belp!

http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-63437.html

You could also use NFS. i'm not in front of a mac system right now, but it would go something like on the mini using terminal

$share /Volumes/<usb_drive_name>

and then on the powerbook

$mount <computer_ip>:/Volumes/<usb_drive_name> /Users/<username>/Desktop/<mount_point>

You would obviously need to fill in your information where you see <> above. for the mount_point, just create an empty folder on your desktop and substitute the name of the new folder for .

Of course, this is a very UNIX-y way of doing this. it could be that you are just looking in the wrong place for your usb drive. you can't just share out your desktop and find mounted devices there. you need to share /Volumes because that is where periferals are actually mounted. like i said, i'm not in front of a mac right now, so i can't check.

Answer 2

You can try changing the connect to server address from something like 'mac.local' to

'mac.local/Volumes/NameOfUSBDrive' and see if that helps. I would test here but do all of my sharing via OSXServer instead of OSX.

Answer 3

Actually if you enable sharing with SMB protocol, you can go to Finder's Go >> "Connect to server" and use smb://YourMacName. This way the shared drive will appear in the list. Sorry but I don't know how to use AFP protocol.