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KeepingYouAwake on Mac OS X

On my Mac, one of the annoying “features” is when the Mac screensaver comes on, the device eventually goes to sleep, and it disconnects the network. Which in turn timeouts services like Slack or Google, because these services keep a network connection open at all times. When waking up the device, I often have to login again into all the services, even though the device is just sitting in my working room on the desk all day and night. Very annoying.

I suppose it’s one of these things where Apple thinks they know better how users want their device to behave.


Connect a Mac to a SMB server - as Guest

One of the things I do in our network is public drives. Every Linux system has a public incoming which is mapped to the primary user of the device (if there is one, like for a laptop). And this incoming shared drive can be accessed without password.

This makes it really convenient to copy files around from one laptop/user to another, or from mobile devices to laptops and vice versa, or use the printer/scanner to send the scan job directly to the laptop of the user’s device. All in all, the users like this, and use it a lot. There is also minimal protection built-in, it will only work in our home network, access is blocked when the laptop is connected to a different network. But the folders are mostly empty anyway. For sharing files over the Internet we also have a Syncthing instance running, but that’s a different story, and not as easy to use.

One thing which I was annoyed about is that by default a Mac will try to connect as a registered user. There is an option Connect as Guest, but it’s not pre-selected. Therefore every time I wanted to share something between Linux and Mac, I had to start Finder, to to Go and then Connect to Server, then click on the server from the list of last entries, and then also click on Guest. The built-in help is also not useful, as it only talks about “click on Guest”.