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IMPORTANT: Starting with El Capitan and increasingle with later versions Apple has been adding enough (justified) complexity and security to Mac OS X (MacOS) that programs like SMBUp have a hard time running. With Mojave and Catalina it became completely unmanageable. Because of this I’m sorry to declare that SMBUp may not run properly in these platforms and its use is thus unsupported for them and development consequently has stopped.

If you’re using SMBUp to share files through Samba in Mac OS X Lion and Mac OS Mountain Lion, it’s possible you’ve found a problem trying to create new users to share with, along with other issues. This post aims at solving some common problems and explain doubts about the program and its design decisions.

Fact is Apple doesn’t even try to fix some of the internal calls Mac OS X receives from Samba on one side and Samba has no intention to support Mac OS X after Apple dropped support for them with Lion.

How can I add sharing-only users to SMBUp/Samba shares
You can add custom users to Samba/SMBUp with these steps:

  1. Create sharing-only user In your “accounts”/”Users & Groups” Preferences section click the “+” to add a new user and select, from the pop-up menu, “Sharing Only”:
    Creating Sharing Only user
  2. Add the sharing-only user to Samba issuing these commands in the terminal: 
    sudo /opt/local/bin/smbpasswd -a newuser
sudo /opt/local/bin/smbpasswd -e newuser

    Paste each one separately. Keep in mind the first command will first ask for the administrator password and then for the password for the new user, twice. Replace “newuser” with the user you created in the previous step. If you have Samba installed in a different route replace “/opt/local/bin/” with the proper path.
    running smbpasswd in the terminal

  3. Confirm that the user shows up and has been added to Samba in SMBUp
    User added to SMBUp
  4. Assign permissions to the folder you want to share. You can do this in the finder or in the “Sharing” preference pane (do not enable File Sharing or, if you have to, make sure “SMB” is disabled)
    Setting sharing permissions from the Finder
    Setting sharing permissions from the System Preferences Sharing pane
  5. Share the folder in SMBUp if you haven’t already done so.
    Adding shared folder to SMBUp

You should then be able to connect to the new shared folder with the newly-created user and permissions should work. NOTE: You can use the force user parameter in smb.conf to map access to this folder to this single user

SMBUp warns that user has more than 16 groups
Mac OS X uses a special inheritance method for groups that means many users (and admin users as a rule) will belong to more than 15 groups. Samba has a problem with this as the methods it uses to know how many groups a user belongs to don’t work properly in Lion. When this happens, SMBUp will show a warning message:

16groupswarning

To correct this you need to create custom sharing-only users in OS X and add them to Samba directly from the terminal.

Follow the steps in question “How to add sharing-only users to SMBUp/Samba shares” to create these users.

Finder doesn’t show network drives in the sidebar
As mentioned in the main SMBUp page this is a necessary side effect of insalling Samba. This is because samba installs its own netbios and SMB managers. These replace the native OS X ones, which is what OS X uses to “discover” network servers. A workaround is to connect to shared drives directly and drag them to the sidebar to create shortcuts for them.
Go Menu in Finder
Network Browse

Finder doesn’t show network drives in the sidebar after removing SMBUp
When removing SMBUp sometimes the uninstaller fails to reset the native services as they should be. When this happens the most common result is that the Finder Sidebar doesn’t show servers from the network or that OS X can’t share itself as before. When this happens please follow these instructions:

  1. In System Preferences -> Sharing -> File Sharing: Check (if unchecked) “Options -> Share Files and Folders using SMB” and uncheck it again.
  2. In System Preferences -> Network -> Advanced -> WINS: Change your NetBIOS Name to something else and change it back to what you wish it to be.
  3. Restart
  4. If the above doesn’t work, execute these commands in the terminal line by line and restart afterwards. Keep in mind you’ll be asked for your administrator password. 
    
sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.samba.smbd.plist
sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.samba.nmbd.plist
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.netbiosd.plist
sudo launchctl start com.apple.netbiosd
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.smbd.plist
sudo launchctl start com.apple.smbd
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.smb.preferences.plist
sudo launchctl start com.apple.smb.preferences
  5. After the above, go to System Preferences and set-up your sharing permissions as you wish.

How can I uninstall SMBUp?
SMBUp includes a menu and screen to uninstall some or all packages it installs originally.
uninstallmenuitem
By default the only items marked for uninstall are the scripts that run Samba and the installer files. This means the services would stop running but the files would be kept for future needs.
uninstallsmbup
If you decide you don’t want any trace of SMBUp then you can check “All Installed” and all files should be marked for deletion.
NOTE: Sometimes the uninstaller may find errors deleting specific files or folders and these may remain, but the service itself should always be disabled regardless of these possible errors. After uninstalling you can check for the existence of the “/opt” directory and, if it still exists, you can delete it manually((As long as you don’t use MacPorts, which needs it as well.))

The Samba installer from SMBUp doesn’t complete. How to install Samba manually?
Sometimes the integrated Samba installer from SMBUp may hang in the “Preparing to Install…” section. When this happens, if you’ve been waiting for activity for more than 10 minutes, you can safely force-quit SMBUp and install manually.

To be able to install manually you can check if you have a Samba installer disk mounted on your mac and use the installer in it or, if you prefer, download Samba from here and use it instead.

Download Samba 3.2.15 installer for Mac OS (DMG/PKG)

How can I scan from my network scanner/MFD into my mac’s shared drives?
Instructions to scan to network folders shared with Samba through SMBUp should be similar for most platforms.
Instructions for the Kyocera Copystar system
Instructions for HP Network scanners to scan to your share drive:
HP OfficeJet 8500A Pro
HP OfficeJeft 8600 Pro Plus

After a Mac OS X Security Update samba can’t be started/”Passing non-absolute shell paths is not currently supported.”
Donneo has discovered that this error can come up after a system or security update. The
solution is reinstalling samba from the Samba installer that SMBUp includes.

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NOTA: Esta entrada la publiqué inicialmente en Wocial.

Tal vez la cita más famosa referida a Steve Jobs, donde realmente el cita una frase atribuida supuestamente a Picasso. Al tiempo de ser la frase más citada de Jobs es también la menos comprendida, por lo fácil que es tomarla literalmente.

Buscando hoy en día casi sólo es posible encontrar la atribución a Picasso por parte de Steve Jobs. Todos los sitios que lo hacen son posteriores a su primer uso en 1984 en el equipo de Macintosh en Apple y a 1988, cuando se hizo famosa públicamente por primera vez1.

Salió por algo en Twitter, y me puse a investigar. Obviamente esto está más que masticado y pongo mi granito de arena más para ahondar en la cita que para narrar su historia, pero un poco de eso hay también.

La cita, muchos hemos sabido, nunca ha significado hacer copias literales sino que es más sutil, habla de inspiración vs. plagio.

La cita, como se repite, es realmente la evolución y simplificación de una idea de T.S. Eliot y una frase de Picasso relacionada tangencialmente.

La de Picasso primero, porque es más corta:

To copy others is necessary but to copy oneself is pathetic.

La de T.S. Eliot es una idea desarrollada, no una cita, en su libro The Sacred Wood, en el capítulo de Philip Massinger, contemporáneo de Shakespeare, del que dice que esencialmente copia a Shakespeare sin hacer la copia suya:

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too close to them to be of use to them in this way. Massinger, as Mr. Cruickshank shows, borrows from Shakespeare a good deal.

Aquí podemos ver, en la segunda oración, la semilla de la frase final:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

Esta versión aún es clara en lo que quiere decir, porque no es binaria. Habla de poetas (no artistas, aún) maduros e inmaduros y por separado de los que son buenos y los que son malos. En este contexto “imitar” significa hacer lo mismo sin entenderlo, “robar” significa hacer lo mismo sabiendo por qué vale la pena. Luego, al margen de lo anterior, los que son malos logran algo peor que el original (porque saber qué copiar o saber por qué no significa tener la habilidad del original) y los que son buenos lo mejoran, haciendo su propia versión que se sostiene por sí misma sobre el trabajo anterior (un homenaje o una inspiración bien hechos son esto).

“Robar”, en este contexto, no significa apropiarte de lo otro sino hacer algo tan particular y propio con ello que se asocie contigo solamente, no como una inspiración o derivación de algo existen. Lo que “robas” es el mérito y la fama de tu creación (sin afectar la del original).

Es comprensible que el texto que lo explica desapareciese (ya que no sería una cita citable) pero es raro que la versión corta sufriese tantos cambios y que fuese mal atribuida tantas veces.

A mediados del S.XX la cita de Eliot había ya mutado:

T. S. Eliot once wrote that the immature poet imitates and the mature poet plagiarizes.

[…] even forty years ago T. S. Eliot knew that he was perpetuating a cliché in saying so, […] To paraphrase a contemporary critic, “Immature artists borrow; mature artists steal”; and Joyce was a mature artist.

Esquire en 1967 saca la primera versión que se parece a la actual, pero se la atribuye a Lionel Trilling:

“Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.”—Lionel Trilling

La cita se le atribuye a Stravinsky en algún momento también y empieza a ser obvio que, al ser un concepto relativamente obvio (la frase “en los hombros de gigantes” alude al mismo concepto, cuando haces algo grande pero no podrías haberlo hecho sin los que hicieron lo suyo antes) mucha gente ha dicho variaciones de la misma frase durante décadas. Pero la onda empieza a colapsarse, la frase empieza a parecerse en sus diferentes variantes.

Cuando finalmente colapsa en la psique colectiva es cuando Jobs la resume, famosamente, en:

“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”

La primera vez que la versión final se ve impresa es en el Sydney Morning Herald de Australia, en 1988, atribuida a Steve Jobs:

He headed the team that developed the Macintosh. Steve Jobs said that while it was being developed he kept in mind a quote from Pablo Picasso: “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”

De aquí, el meme estaba servido. Una cita citable, que parece subversiva (aunque realmente no lo es), lanzada por el “chico malo” de Silicon Valley, en el contexto del inicio de las guerras de demandas que ocuparon a Microsoft y Apple durante los siguientes 10 años, puesta en el contexto de que aunque Jobs dijo eso, Apple ahora demandaba a Microsoft por copiarles a ellos (una asociación que aún hoy sigue haciéndose por la gente tan inteligente que puebla sitios como los comentarios de Menéame, Alt1040 y Twiter, muy a pesar de sus administradores que seguramente preferirían que pensasen dos veces antes de comentar).

De ahí en adelante la cita se ha atribuido casi siempre a Picasso y casi siempre en conjunto con Steve Jobs.

La “confusión” (de serlo) de Jobs puede venir precisamente de mezclar una misma idea pero dos fuentes diferentes: La frase de Picasso y la frase de Eliot, aprendidas ambas al mismo tiempo, mal citadas después sin pensar que fuese importante y sin imaginar que se volvería su cita (de una cita) más famosa.

La gran ironía termina siendo que diciendo mal tanto la cita como el autor de la misma, Jobs logró lo mismo: Que se asociase con él en la historia, robándosela a otros dos sin ni siquiera darse cuenta de que lo hacía.

  1. y 1996 cuando se hizo la entrevista de la que sale el clip que pongo en la cabecera, del genial documental Triumph of the Nerds,obligado para todos vosotros

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