Mac experts - help!

[Paul Held]

I went and did it - the house is all Mac (after successfully running a couple different flavors of Vista, XP and Apple TV based servers at home and cottage. The Vista stuff will stay at the cottage but the house is now all Mac. Loving it. Sounds great (Vista sounded great too)

 

This is a Mac newbie talking - I need very basic help with something. I have the 3 Macs talking to each other over the Extreme-based network I put in at the same time.

 

The office has the iMac. This is not my music server. This machine has a 1TB USB drive hanging of it it directly for Time Machine back up of the families materials. But, I partitioned that USB drive with a FAT 32 partition to hold miscellaneous stuff as well, like things that I might want to share with other non-Mac machines in the house. The specific miscellaneous in this case is a 256k AAC copy of my ALAC library from my music room Mac Mini. I very simply want to copy the 256k copy iTunes library from the Mini in the basement to the iMac in the office. That library is about 50G and it gets updated on my Mini as I add music to the ALAC library and subsequently downconvert it for the ipod, etc.

 

The iMac in the office has share on with me, "users" and "everyone" having write/read. However, all my Mini sees is the iMac's "public" folder and drop box. I can't see the USB drive hanging off the iMac. I must be missing something obvious, like I have to share the entire iMac or something else dead-simple.

 

Can one of you gurus please help a newbie out? thanks in advance

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

Hi Paul - Happy to help. Go into your Sharing preferences, where you enabled File Sharing (System Preferences). Click on File Sharing on the let side, you'll see that Public is the only folder shared by default. Add the needed disk or folder and make sure to let everybody have access.

 

Maybe you've already done this. Let me know.