What do you do when you need the answer to a question and Google doesn’t deliver? Ask on the blog of course… I would really like to know the answer to this one, as it would save a large amount of irritation and I assume others have the same problem. I’ve spent hours buried deep in search engine results with no luck.
As befits a family with jobs in the computer industry, we have a few computers spread around the house, all connected with a decent home network and protected with a good Linux-based firewall (which also serves this blog). The computers run a number of operating systems — Windows 2000, Windows XP, Mac OS X, Solaris. The problem only appears with the Windows XP boxes — or rather, between them. For some reason, one Windows XP box can’t see all the files and folders on the other Windows XP box, although they’re quite visible from both Windows 2000 and OS X. The odd thing is that some files and folders are visible, often some files in a given folder will be visible but the others won’t, and to my eye there are no differences in security settings, ownership, or ACLs. Mind you, I’m obviously missing something somewhere or I’d be able to see all those files from every machine in the house! I tried copying some of the files to new directories; sometimes that lets me see them across the network, and sometimes it doesn’t. I have no idea what settings are being put in place to stop me looking at such dangerous files as .css and .html in particular directories; the system seems capricious — as does any system when you haven’t figured out the rules by which it operates. The innate ability of the human brain to figure out patterns has decidedly failed me in this instance.
Help would be much appreciated, not only for me but for the rest of the family who have to put up with my imprecations each time I want to transfer files from one box to the other, only to find that they’re not visible from the box I want to transfer them to.