With its macOS operating system, Apple has done everything to make users’ lives easier. Almost every aspect of the desktop is as user-friendly as possible. This is true even when you connect your device to a network share on your LAN.
What is a network share?
Simply put, it is a folder that resides on one machine in your local network and is accessible from other machines. Example: Olivia works on machine A and has a folder called Public which is shared on the network. The Public folder is configured so that a special account (named guest) has access to the folder. Anyone on the local network (who has guest account credentials) will be able to access the contents of this folder. Depending on how Olivia has configured access, these users may have only read access or full read/write access.
How to connect to a network share?
That’s what I’m going to show you, and I’m going to demonstrate it on macOS Monterey from an M1-based MacBook Pro. There was a time (in macOS v10 and earlier) where you could view all the machines on your network, but that feature no longer exists. Instead, you have to manually connect to each server from the Finder. That’s what we’re going to do now.
For this to work, you will need four things:
- A shared directory on your network;
- The IP address of the computer hosting the shared directory;
- A user account that can access the share (unless the share is configured for anonymous access);
- A device running macOS.
Connect macOS to a network share
The first step is to log into your device and open Finder (macOS’s file manager). Once Finder is open, click on the Go menu entry. In this menu, click on Connect to Server. In the upper text box, type the server address in the form smb://SERVER (where SERVER is the IP address of the server hosting the share). For example, if the host IP address is 192.168.1.62, you would enter smb://192.168.1.62. Click Connect and a new window will appear asking you to verify that you want to connect to the server.
Then click Connect and you will then be prompted to enter the credentials for the share. Click Registered User, then type the username and password of the user associated with the share and click Connect. If there are multiple shared directories on this server, you will then be prompted to select which one you want to use.
After successful authentication, the Finder opens with the contents of the shared directory and you can start working with the files. That’s all there is to connecting to a network share from macOS. Enjoy this glorious access to these directories on your local network.
Source: ZDNet.com