I wanted to share files on my company’s Mac Mini with other Windows computers over SMB. The Mac clearly had “File Sharing” turned on, yet the Windows machines refused to see the machine, let alone the shared folders. After half a day of tinkering, I finally found the real culprit — with the help of a pile of command-line tools. This post records the whole troubleshooting process, and also gives a good rant about Windows’ junk-pile design that has only gotten messier from Win10 to Win11.

Remember [that April post agonizing over device choices]? Back then I listed a bunch of candidates, weighed them one by one, and confidently declared I would “stick with the Fydetab Duo.” Well… it turns out humans can’t escape the universal law of zhen xiang (something you dismissed turns out to be great), and in the end I bought the MacBook Neo after all.

I recently got a Mac Mini to use as a server. I initially thought that since macOS is based on Unix, it would be pretty much like Linux — just set it up and go. But once I actually started using it, I ran into quite a few pitfalls. Here’s a record of the main issues.