It is possible, in Maiz, to share every kind of files you want to on the local network. Whatever you want to share, class notes, pictures taken during the last party, or much heavier working documents, broadcasting is only inside Maiz and allows much greater data flow (100 Mbits/s, that is 12MB/s)
Configuration under Windows
Configuration under windows is quite simple. Under windows 7, just go to the Control panel, then inside "Change homeGroup and sharing settings". next, click "Change advances sharing settings".
The proper settings are:
- Turn on network discovery
- Turn on file and printer sharing
- use 128-bit encryption
- Turn off password protected sharing
- Allow Windows to manage HomeGroup connections
Reassure yourself, other users can only access the folders you give them access manually. Activate these options will not broadcast your whole hard drive on the network.
To broadcast a folder on the network, just right-click the folder icon and choose "Share with > Homegroup". For obvious security reasons, it is recommended to give a read-only access to your hard drive.
Configuration under GNU/Linux
The software you have to use to access sharing from other Linux computers, and to Windows computers that represent the main part of the network, is Samba.
The procedure to install and configure Samba on Debian is really well described in the tutoriel from Debian GNU/Linux Training (French). The operations that are to be done under other distributions are often quite similar. Please refer to the informations concerning your own distribution for more details.
There are several graphical user interfaces for samba: "system-config-samba" is a package that is present in some dsitributions' repositories, such as Fedora's or Ubuntu's, but not in Debian's. Under Debian, the package "gadmin-samba" may be used.
Once the GUI is installed, samba is very easy to use.
Configuration under MacOS
There are many differences between Windows and MacOS, that's why it is necessary to be careful about the files that will be shared from a Mac.
First, use simple filenames (only made of letters and numbers) because Windows doesn't accept some characters, such as . , /, :, [ ] in filenames.
Then, make sure your Mac does display filename extensions. Mac and Linux are both able to recognise and use a file without any extension, but windows can't. So as to display a file's extension, select it in the finder and choose "File > Read the informations" then untick the "Mask extensions" option.
Once these precautions have been taken, you have to activate Windows Sharings in "System settings > Sharing". Folders shared by other users can be accessed in the finder, by clicking the "network" icon