Ordinary Mac User

Sharing Internet Connectivity - Easy On A Mac

As I type this, I am writing on my MacBook Pro, in the back seat of our minivan as my wife drives us for a day-long family errand trip. We're driving on I-5 North of Seattle and it's a clear day and the mountains in view are really beautiful with their late winter patches of snow.

I'm able to work because of my Sprint Mobile Broadband service lets me stay connected to the Internet at decent (equivalent to Digital Subscriber Line - DSL) speeds. (It helps, a lot, that I'm using a Xantrex 300 watt inverter providing just enough, and just good enough, "AC" power for the Apple AC power adapter for my MacBook Pro.)

The Geek in me is looking forward to another* family first in Broadband Wireless Internet Access. My daughter brought her new (Christmas present from the grandparents) MacBook with her on the trip and plans to use it to catch up on some homework (she's off this week for Spring Break). To my daughter, "using her laptop" is equivalent to being connected to the Internet at Broadband speeds. In our house, my daughter's laptop "just works" on the Internet because I've set up Wi-Fi coverage for the house. Years ago, for her previous computer (a desktop), I ran an Ethernet cable into her room. But ever since she's had the laptop, the Ethernet cable has gone unused; I doubt she even knows that she can connect her laptop via Ethernet. She's always used Wi-Fi.

Grrr - SFTP Doesn't Work In OSX 10.4 or 10.5 Finder

I was looking at a hosting company that offers 100 GB storage for a reasonably small fee.

That's enough for me to start using remote storage.

The way I'd prefer to do use it  is to mount the server as just another disk in the Finder, to be able to drag and drop to it.

The Mac makes this possible (but not anything resembling intuitive) with the Finder's Go, Connect To Servers menu items. You would then type in your server's URL, and when it connects, you type in your username and password and the server is then shown in the finder as just another drive, to be viewed, dragged into, etc. The Mac handles the "heavy lifting" of the file transfers in the background.

Theoretically - I haven't actually accomplished any of this yet.

The reason I haven't is that when I did attempt it on my current server, I couldn't get it to work with the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). It seems to work fine with (non-secure) File Transfer Protocol.

The latter transmits your username and password in the clear - to be quickly eavesdropped and intercepted, and your server is then completely open to being hijacked and hacked. Not to mention your files on the server are vulnerable.

So using SFTP isn't just a good idea... it's the (only) way you should do file transfers (well, using the other Secure file transfer protocols like Secure Copy [SCP]). In this era, you shouldn't ever use the non-secure versions of file transfer.

So Apple only supporting FTP in the Finder, but not SFTP, is... let's just say a regrettable lack, and something that Apple should fix. Maybe already has - I'll try it with my daughter's MacBook which has OSX 10.5. Update from initial post - Nope, it doesn't. At least the "error" handling for this has improved in 10.5 - now instead of "failing" as it does in 10.4, there's a popup that says something to the effect that sftp:// "doesn't appear to be a recognized URL format". Oh... this is so clueless!

Apple does support / include SFTP in OSX 10.4 (and presumably 10.5) - it's there on the Terminal command line, and works just fine there, exactly as you'd expect if you're familiar with command-line (S)FTP. But it doesn't work in the Finder... thus the Grrr.

By Steve Stroh

This article is Copyright © 2008 by Steve Stroh except for specifically-marked excerpts. Excerpts and links are expressly permitted (and encouraged).

 

Why I Started Ordinary Mac User

Welcome to Ordinary Mac User!

I've been using a Mac for... I think... about three years now. I use a Mac because I got tired of putting up with system crashes, spyware, and viruses on Windows systems, and an especially bad experience with a new Windows laptop. It's not that I didn't know how to keep a Windows system running - I was a Windows and Novell SysAdmin for a Fortune 100 company. But when I started writing professionally, I wanted a computer system that "just worked", and the Mac, once they got OSX shipped and stable (around OSX 10.3 when I bought my first Mac) was just that. Steven Roberts, who was one of the long-time Mac users I asked for advice said it well - "This thing is just an appliance". (That's high praise, when describing a computer.)

I need to make one major point clear - I'm not a rabid Apple / Mac fan. I'm not a cheerleader for Apple or especially "the Apple way of life". I don't live and breathe Apple (but I do confess to watching the Steve Jobs product introductions with a sense of anticipation for "the cool new stuff".) I'm also not a "Microsoft Hater" that uses Apple product as an "anti-Microsoft" statement. That said, I don't think very highly of Microsoft's business practices as company that has a conviction as a Monopolist on their record. I also don't think very highly of Windows systems to date suffering from "accumulated cruft and bloat" from too-numerous-to-count inline updates, vulnerability to viruses and spyware. Windows Vista looks way too complicated (and a bit underwhelming for lack of features that have been promised), but it's at least a more secure Windows based on current technology, not the creaky technology that Windows XP was based on. In a few years, as new generations of cheap computers catch up with Vista's requirements (as they always do), Vista looks pretty promising.

I use, and enjoy using a computer to get my work (writing) done, and my tool / computer of choice, all things considered, at the moment, is a Mac.