In our examples, we’re assuming that we want access from anywhere, so be sure to say “Yes”. You’ll be asked if you wish to extend the service to the Internet. All that’s required is clicking the button on the right side of the File Sharing pane of the Server app. Now it’s time to actually turn on File Sharing and allow users to gain access to this folder. Note that it may take a minute or so for this to occur depending on the speed of your server. Once all of the permissions for this folder have been set up, click the OK button to apply those permissions to the folder. If you only want the Photographers to be able to read items but not make any changes to anything in the Photo Tools folder, select Read Only from the picker at the right side. By default, the Photographers group is provided with read/write access.
To do this, click the plus button and type “Photographers” into the field that appears.
Next, we want to give the Photographers group created earlier full read/write access to the folder. It’s also possible to add guest users, although that’s not a good way to “lock down” a server. Here we can change the name and location of the folder, set up the type of access (we’ve selected iOS, WebDAV and SMB, and are only allowing encrypted connections). Setting permissions for the Photo Tools shared folder To do this, click the Photo Tools shared folder to select it, then click the pencil button below to edit the folder permissions (see screenshot below). We only want the admin and our Photographers group (created last week) to have access. Now it’s time to restrict access to the Photo Tools folder. However, for security it’s best to keep users - especially those coming in from outside of your network - limited to one specific folder rather than an entire hard drive or RAID array. You don’t have to limit yourself to a folder - that “folder” can actually be a complete storage volume. Click the Choose button to denote the location of the folder. The usual Apple Finder “Choose” dialog appears, and from this we’ll select the folder named “Photo Tools” that’s on our Backup drive. To add a shared folder, we click the now-familiar plus-sign button ( + ) below the Shared Folders section. Next, we go to the running Server app and select File Sharing from Services in the sidebar. We’ll create a folder in the Finder on our Backup drive and call it “Photo Tools”.
It’s an OWC miniStack with 1 TB of storage, although a real company would most likely use a drive or RAID array with much more storage to share among multiple users. To keep this folder separate from the server’s hard drive, we’ll create it on a second drive called “Backup”. In this example, we’ll set up a shared folder for a hypothetical group of users at our company “Astounding Photos”.
This means that we’re going to allow users to connect to the server and have access to folders in which they can store or share files with others. The first service that we’ll set up for our users is file sharing. Part 3: Router Configuration and Open Directory.
This is the fourth in an ongoing series on The Rocket Yard describing how to use Apple’s macOS Server to provide services to users both inside and outside of a local network. Find the entire macOS Server series here!