t 'n t luoma

Note: this is for Mac OSX only. Connect Dreamhost in Windows using Samba

You'll notice that setting it up for Windows is more complicated than for Mac OSX, even though this is called Windows Files Sharing.

Setting things up on the Dreamhost side

Goto Users section of the Dreamhost panel and select 'edit' (it appears to be possible to enable SMB for both SSH/telnet or FTP-only account). Look for the text that reads:

Samba: Enable SMB (Windows file sharing) access to this account.
SMB password (enter twice):

Note: This is a different password than your other account information, but it needs to be plenty secure. I do not know if they use any sort of encryption for this.

When you have entered the password, click Save Changes. It will tell you that you need to wait up to two hours, but by the time I had setup the Mac OSX side, it was already working.

Setting up the Mac OSX Side

In the immortal words of my former Computer Science professor, "Everything is easy when you know what you are doing." Setting up SMB for OS X is dead simple (at least in Panther, you'll have to check for earlier versions).

Step 1: Open Finder.
Step 2: Goto View > Connect to Server (Mac+K)
Step 3: Enter smb://example.dreamhost.com/username (of course change 'example' and 'username' to reflect your server and username) so it looks like this.

Step 4: Click 'Connect' and the account is mounted in Finder as 'Username' (and can be accessed via Terminal.app as /Volumes/username).

That's it. You can use any of your local apps to edit/view remote files. Got your own specially tweaked out version of emacs on your machine? A 6,000 line .bashrc that you don't want to have to sync back and forth between servers? Well now you can use them all on your personal machine for remote files.

By the way, if you are looking for a webhost, I highly recommend Dreamhost. I've been with them for only a little while and their service and support

http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?luomat

If you sign up following that link (or enter 'luomat' as the referral field) I get a little signing bonus which helps cover my hosting fees. No obligation, of course, but if you're going to sign up anyway, it won't cost you anything and will help me out.