Home Forums Networks & Cross-Platform Networking HELP! File sharing gone crazy

(trying to stay calm)

4 iMacs here, named Tom Simon William and Mike. Forget Mike for the moment.

Last night I upgraded William from Tiger to SL.
Tom and Simon came with SL pre-installed. So all three are on Snow Leopard.

This morning, William's file sharing has gone crazy. Before I upgraded it, file sharing worked perfectly as it should across Tiger and SL Macs.

William can't network to Tom at all. No connection. However, Tom can network to William.

William can only connect to Simon's public drop box, which is not the way it was before: before it could see the whole hard disk.

On William's system preferences> sharing> file sharing> Shared folders is empty, users is empty. I cannot navigate to William's Public Folder to put it in there. Spotlight cannot find it either.

William can access the internet (I'm typing this on William) and print, so it's not the router.

I have rebooted.

What's gone wrong? ?????????

How to get out of this / make it work? PLEASE help soon, because it wasn't like this before I upgraded from Tiger, yesterday.

Well, I've fixed it.

On the Finder panel which comes up when you click Shared to see other computers, I found a switch which I had never noticed before. It's on the right, underneath the Spotlight.

I disconnected to all other Macs one by one, and reconnected as the Admin (using full name and password), one by one.

I am glad that I managed to fix it and can now get on with work. However, I have to add that solution that is not written in any of the Mac Help documentation either on-board the computer or on the Apple site.

Maybe no-one ever thought that that switch would be needed to disconnect/reconnect to re-establish file sharing. I don't know.........

It may be that the switch you mention is not really needed to (re-)establish file sharing, but rather that making a change forces some preference file or other setting elsewhere to (re-)correct itself.

It is not uncommon in trouble-shooting to make a change that is really not desired, just to be able to change it back in the hopes things will right themselves.

That's a good reply Ira and I thank you for it.

I think that the real reason, however, is that installing a new operating system will perforce mean that some system preferences have changed (gone to default) when you get your Mac back. Including file sharing.

Does it actually say this anywhere? On help files? Not that I could see. Maybe I just asked the wrong questions - I was dealing with computerised help after all.........

Internet Explorer, when loaded for the first time on this newly-upgraded iMac, required Rosetta installation first.

Is this not odd? Does this mean that IE does not work on any OS higher than 10.6?

That's bad news. Two websites I have to use for work on a daily basis do not work with any other browser.

(Well, it's only bad news if+when we have to upgrade to Lion.)

Does IE work correctly on any OS? All the web developers I talk to say NO. They have to design their websites to work with standards-compliant browsers, and to work with IE too.

(I have heard that later versions of IE are becoming more standards-compliant. You can certainly expect later versions of IE to become more Lion-compatible. The major hold-up, of course, is the time it takes to make all your plugins Lion-compatible, which is to say, 64-bit Intel.)

In the meantime, on those two websites that work only with IE, look for a link to provide feedback/bug reports to the website administrator. Use that feedback now, while you still can, to admonish them to make the site accessible from modern standards-compliant browsers.

Internet Explorer was discontinued for Mac quite a number of years ago.

If a Web site requires Internet Explorer to work, I recommend not using it. If a Web site for the company you work for requires Internet Explorer to work, I recommend raising holy hell with your employer. If none of that works, it may be possible to trick the site into working with Safari; many sites that claim to work only with Explorer are written by lazy, incompetent IT people who don't know anything about modern Web standards, and who don't bother to test with other browsers...but they work fine in other browsers all the same.

In the Safari preferences menu, click Advanced. Then click the check box that says "Show developer menu in menu bar." You will see a new menu item appear between "Bookmarks" and "Window," called "Develop."

Open a new page. Click the Develop menu and choose User Agent->Internet Explorer 7.0. Then go to the site. Does it work?

Tacit, thanks as ever for your erudite and learned reply.

I do not have time right now to try your suggestions, but the two websites to which I refer, there is absolutely no question of 'not using it'.

One is Companies House (a government site) whose downloads are ONLY accessible in IE unless you only have one download; the other is the LIFFE exchange (London International Financial and Futures Exchange).

Companies House states on their website that their downloads only work with IE so I have to use it for them (I have tested this, being naturally adventurous/cynical); LIFFE I have tackled by email some years ago and they said that they only work properly with IE too. (There is a workaround for the LIFFE site however.)

Apologies if I seem somewhat terse: am working.......

If you absolutely must use IE (and it sounds as if that is the case) the only currently available option on a Mac would be to install something like Parallels Desktop or BootCamp and Windows. I use Parallels Desktop because it can run Windows applications such as Internet Exploder transparently on the OS X Desktop alongside OS X applications. BootCamp is an either/or proposition where you either run OS X or Windows but not both at the same time, however BootCamp is free and Parallels Desktop is $80 and you still have to buy and install a copy of Windows.

To be clear about this: buying Windows is a requirement of both Bootcamp and Parallels.

I wonder if IE will run in WINE or its variants? (crossover etc)

I believe it will.

There is also a free alternative to Parallels, called VirtualBox. I've tried it, and it works quite well