Parallels Shared Folders vs. Network

T

Todd Osborne

Bit poster
I am curious about the advantages of using Parallels Shared Folders versus the normal (SAMBA) networking? What would be the advantage of PSF? It seems to me, from my experience, that this is VERY buggy and causes problems, yet mapping a drive to my Mac's SAMBA sharing works just great.

So my question is why does PSF even exist? Is it supposed to be faster? Just a wrapper to SAMBA? Useful when Windows Sharing is not enabled? I just cannot find a compelling reason why this exists. In an otherwise great product, which I have purchased, PSF is a real PITA.

Todd
 
One reason I can think of is security. Firing up SAMBA opens it up to all of your Mac's network interfaces. If I could figure out how to edit /etc/smb.conf so that it serves SMB only over en2 (the host-only network), I would do it, and I'd never use PSF again.

I had hoped that PSF would be faster, but my tests indicate it is not.
 
Securing Samba

You should be able to secure SAMBA using the Mac's built in firewall feature, limiting access to a single NIC. I also use SharePoints on the Mac to better configure SAMBA. If needed, I think the "listen" line in the smb.conf file should do the trick for you.
 
If PSF does bypass networking (I haven't tried this yet) it would be very useful for me. I almost always have my virtual machine connected to my work VPN which prevents me from accessing the local network.

I'm also hoping that at some point down the road printer queues will be shared through parallels tools as well. I'd love to be able to print to my network based laser printer while connected to the VPN.

tom
--
Thomas Micheline
duff at atollsw dot com
 
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