I want to map a network drive between my MAC OS laptop and the Tormach PCNC 440 machines on my campus. I have watched a video about the process but want to know if there are any other details I should become aware. For instance, is my MAC laptop compatible with mapping a network drive with the Tormach machine? What are the details about mapping a network drive under a ethernet or WIFI connection with a password, etc. Please be as detailed as possible. Thank you
I’d start by asking your campus IT people if such a thing is possible. It’s quite likely they have file sharing like that blocked by default on the network.
They should be able to add you and the machine to the user groups so that you can access a shared drive on the machine.
I understand and am meeting with IT to discuss more on this. However, a question has come to light after further discussion with people who set up the Tormach machines on my campus. Do I need to ask Tormach for special permission for this process, or any process that requires transferring data from the machine to another place (network cloud or machine)? I ask because when I attempted to connect the PCNC 440 to a wireless network on my campus to initially test this process, it asked for a password. I was informed this could be the “administrative” password set by IT, but was then told this could be a special password I need to acquire from Tormach when delving more into PathPilot.
I don’t recall anything on the Tormach side but the Samba file share name/password. That would come up well after you’ve connected it to the network and when you’re trying to access it remotely.
Perhaps this plays here?
Yes, absolutely sounds related. I would expect this fairly major change in Windows 11 file sharing permissions to be an issue for quite a few more Tormach users, so hopefully this will help bring it to their attention, as well as Sam’s original one must have done.
I think OP has a Mac, so while that’s useful, I think we’re still a lot of steps away.
Unless it’s a very small campus, the IT guys will likely need to fool with groups and routing tables and firewalls and permissions and whatnot (assuming they even will do it. IME about 80% would just say no).
I have a Mac and a 440, and the share works just fine (shows up just like any other file server drive). The transport method (wifi, ethernet) is irrelevant to the picture, other than wifi obviously is slower than ethernet in most cases but can’t imagine you are throwing such massive gcode files that network speed is the issue. Now doing this in a simple network like your home is trivial, if you are in a corporate environment you will need IT to help you (not in the setup part or the Mac part but most IT departments would frown on an unknown file share popping up on the network). At home presumably you are your own IT department. I have the exact same setup on my raspberry pi that is the gcode runner for my X-carve (running CNCJS) has a samba share on the sd card and the local folder on the pi is a watched folder by cncjs to load the gcode.
One thing if you are in a more public network (i.e. work/school) I made the shares write only (i.e. a drop box share) so you put a file in and that’s fine but you can’t see anything since students shouldn’t be able to affect someone else’s project files, and then my login has read-write privs so I can clear it out. On my home machine it is purely a read-write open share (If somehow my wife dropped a gcode file in the share I would assume she is having a stroke) since the network is protected and only our family, and kids are long gone. SAMBA is pretty easy to install and configure (there are some handy utilities to manage it for you if you aren’t a command line kinda person)