Anonymous SMB sharing from OS X Lion (10.7)

Sharing a folder via SMB (the so called Windows Sharing) with OS X is easy. But username and password were always required. I wanted to make an anonymous share and didn't know how.

Sharing is done like this:

One can see the Everyone user added and still a password was required to log in. Accidentally I found the fix for that.

I had to enable the guest user for file sharing:

That's it. Problem solved.

NOTE: The guest user is disabled by default in OS X Lion. You'll have to enable it first.

Local torrent server on OS X

Today I had to share 13 GB with ~10 people, and I had to do it quickly. I thought of many options - ftp (it would take a while), usb flash drive - even worse.

I thought of the P2P capabilities of the torrent technology. How hard can it be?

Starting a local server couldn't have been easier. I used Tomato Torrent:

There aren't many options, the defaults are good enough. To share the torrents initially I used Transmission. uTorrent for some reason refused to share the files or it was too slow, I don't know.

Transmission:

The torrent server even has a very basic web interface that doesn't tell much, but it is helpful:

13 Gb transmitted to  ~10 people in a 100mbit LAN network in less than an hour. And my machine didn't take that much of a performance hit. I worked during that time.

NOTE: creating the torrents as private somehow made sharing faster. I don't know why. But it did.