IOS – How to manage apps with File Sharing within iOS (without using computer)

AirSharing is a swiss army knife of turning any iOS device into a wireless file server. There are many others, but this program has three versions that have stood the test of time.

The "copy when connected" nut will be harder to crack. Unless someone steps up with a ready made solution, you will have to set up SMNP monitoring of your router and trigger a sync when the iPad MAC address is logged as joining the network. You could also poll bonjour locally, but SNMP seems more elegant to me since it will log and push that join without constant monitoring on the mac end.

The simple act of clicking the "File Sharing" check box will allow the following things to happen.

• Any user account can connect to the machine and access their own home folder, as well as the public folders on any other user account.
• Any administrator users can access the boot disk.

The list of shared folders in the preference pane is for fine-tuning access to public folders and defining customized share points.

You can fine-tune the basic share points with Mac OS X Lion Server, which is available as a software package from the App Store nowadays. It's not terribly practical to try to hack this yourself on the command line. While it may be possible to just mess with the server daemon's configuration files, it may be more trouble than its worth when you could just disable the built-in server and install Netatalk.

Really, the easiest option if you just want to open up parts of your computer to specific logins, would be to create "sharing only" user accounts, allow them access to specific share points that you manually define in System Preferences, and disallow them access to the public folders.