With FTP, Read & Write access means the ability to download, upload, rename, and delete files, and Read Only access means the ability to download files. (An admin user will have much more leeway.)Īlthough this type of access should be fine if you know and trust your users, it does post some added security risk, especially if you're providing access to unknown or untrustworthy people. In other words, normal users will have full Read & Write access to their home directory, Read Only access to other users' Public folders and the Shared user folder, and Read Only access to most other files on your computer. With FTP Access enabled, users will have the same level of access to files that they would have if they were sitting at the computer. I'm going to talk about it briefly, but if you need FTP-like sharing capability, you're far better off using Secure FTP (SFTP) which I talk about later in the chapter. For this reason, I recommend not enabling FTP Access. All usernames, passwords, commands, and file data are sent in plain text, meaning that anyone who might be able to intercept that data would be able to easily figure out the username and password of anyone who connects (and may be able to then use that data to log into other services). FTP has been a staple of Unix servers since well before the Mac OS and Windows even existed, and is largely platform agnostic (it allows connections between Macs, Windows, Unix, Linux, and many other operating systems).įTP has one major drawback: it is one of the least secure methods of communicating between two computers.
FTP, which stands for File Transfer Protocol, is one of these: OS X has an FTP server built in.
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Because of this, Mac OS X also provides a number of ways to share files between Macs and non-Macs.
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However, it has the distinct disadvantage of only allowing sharing between Macs (unless you install special software on a Windows computer, but that's beyond the scope of this book). Personal File Sharing is probably the most feature-rich and flexible OS X method of sharing files over the Internet or a network.