The file sharing dialog has confused me in every version of macOS I’ve used so far (Mojave, Ventura, Sonoma…) and I would like to understand the situation once and for all.
In advanced sharing settings there is a concept called “Windows File Sharing” or “Windows sharing” that, for some reason, appears to be treated separately from simply “SMB sharing”.
Questions
- By “Windows sharing”, is macOS referring to something distinct from SMB sharing? I would’ve thought that the two terms are generally used synonymously. In other words I guess I’m asking “In macOS, does SMB sharing without Windows sharing mean: SMB sharing with other Macs only“? I find it difficult to tell.
- Can no versions of Windows access shares unless “Windows sharing” is enabled? I’ve tried with a fairly up-to-date Windows 10, and it certainly could not. I think it’s safe to say that Windows 10 should have an up-to-date version of SMB available to it, so what could Windows’ SMB client possibly be missing?
- MacOS’s advanced sharing settings mention that some Windows systems can’t access the shares without “Windows sharing” enabled, but this statement is very vague. Does this mean that some Windows systems can access the shares under certain circumstances? Which circumstances are those? I imagine it should be possible to complete the sentence “To access macOS SMB shares without enabling Windows sharing, the following SMB features need to be supported by the client: ______” I have come across no such list of features, which seems to me to be the absolute minimum needed to understand whether a certain SMB client should be able to access macOS SMB shares.
Without knowing this it’s impossible to determine whether any particular SMB client is unable to access the shares because of a problem (and therefore require troubleshooting) or whether it’s unable to do so by design. If possible I would certainly like my Windows systems to use the more secure password handling method whose existence is suggested by macOS’s wording.
Background
I have many SMB clients that I currently have no idea what to expect from. For example:
- Debian 13
- Ubuntu 24.10 (same client as Debian most likely)
- Windows 10
- App-integrated SMB client libraries (like Kodi 21, and some iOS apps)
None of them appears to work. Should any of them work? I don’t know.
Compound this with that I can access macOS SMB shares from other macOS systems, and it’s clear that the shares work — just not for anyone else.
Just forget about it
Why not just enable “Windows sharing” and forget about it? Because, according to me…
- I still wouldn’t understand the situation, which I want to do. It suggests an uncomfortable gap in my knowledge that I would like to fill.
- It gives me the impression that my non-macOS SMB clients are configured to be needlessly insecure. This suggests that they might not be configured properly, period.
- If storing passwords “less securely” is not a noteworthy detail, then surely Apple wouldn’t have bothered to clutter their UI with the note. Therefore I should not assume it.
My knowledge level is: “Not an SMB expert” — I have at most enabled some vfs modules in Linux Samba configurations (e.g. to allow TimeMachine to use shares as targets, and allow iOS to copy files to a share). I’m not familiar with its deeper intricacies.
