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Prevent sharing of Drop Box Network
The amount of free space on my 40 GB hard drive has been continuously decreasing since I bought it, so I decided to go through and delete space wasters. I began my search by looking for exceptionally large files/folders. It was then that I discovered 8 GB of junk in my publicly-available Drop Box.

Someone on my residence hall's network was using my Drop Box as free storage space for illegal copies of copyrighted works. After I finished watching Kill Bill and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I promptly set about patching my newfound security hole:
  1. Purge Unwanted Files — Your drop box can be found at ~/Public/Drop Box.
  2. Change Permissions - With the Drop Box folder folder selected in the finder, press COMMAND+I to show information for your Drop Box. In the window that appears, change the setting for Others to "No Access." If it is hidden, the setting can be found in the Ownership & Permissions section.
Although my free space is still dwindling, the 8 gigs I recovered will be more than enough to get me through the month.
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Prevent sharing of Drop Box | 11 comments | Create New Account
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Make DB Read Only?
Authored by: SJ on Nov 07, '03 11:18:02AM

Umm... why not just set your drop box to READ ONLY... as it's meant to be seeing as it's a Drop Box... hehe. That way you will still have a usable drop box, AND it will prevent that dude from giving you (and everyone else) free movies ;)



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Make DB Read Only ... correction
Authored by: SJ on Nov 07, '03 11:20:26AM

Sorry, now I'm getting confused. Make it WRITE ONLY (not read only).



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Prevent sharing of Drop Box
Authored by: JohnnyMnemonic on Nov 07, '03 11:35:51AM
That someone was doing that to you is kinda funny, really. Do you think that they had an inkling that you were a Mac user, or did they just see an exposed share?

I suppose you could have been more dastardly if you were motivated: trojan some of those files, so that the next time they were run you get a backdoor. etc.

Now that I think about it--why were they doing this? Once they placed those files in your box, unless you changed the permissions from "write only", they shouldn't have been able to get to them again. How would it have been useful for them?

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Prevent sharing of Drop Box
Authored by: kyngchaos on Nov 07, '03 11:44:40AM

This is a bit odd - since it's a drop box (write only), you would think that the offending user on the network would have figured that out and stopped dumping stuff into it that they can't retrieve. Unless they're just being malicious.

Anyways, 2 other options:

1 - just delete the drop box folder, no need to change permissions.

2 - to turn off the Public share altogether, get the SharePoints preference pane. You can turn off Public shares for all users, and create other "Normal" shares like back in the ol' MOS9 days (gives you better control of who can access what).



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Prevent sharing of Drop Box
Authored by: ssevenup on Nov 07, '03 12:54:03PM

In Jaguar you could change the Netinfo database to cripple "Guest" access altogether. In Panther this whole set of properties appears to be missing. The properties in question were something like..

/config/AFPserver/guestAccess no

In Panther this whole config property is missing. I have a note out to Apple about this. By the way, this property was only present in Jaguar after having activated Personal File Sharing at least once.

---
Mark Moorcroft
ELORET Corp. - NASA/Ames RC
Sys. Admin.



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Prevent sharing of Drop Box
Authored by: mhorn on Nov 07, '03 07:59:03PM
Apple has moved the settings to a preference file in /Library/Preferences/AppleFileServer.plist (This may not be the exact path. I'm at work at the moment on a PC.).

The new version of SharePoints will be able to handle accessing this file from a GUI.

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Prevent sharing of Drop Box
Authored by: EatingPie on Nov 07, '03 02:18:54PM

I haven't seen Kill Bill yet. Guess I better make my drop box publicly acessible......

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-Pie


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Prevent sharing of Drop Box
Authored by: Accura on Nov 07, '03 04:25:41PM

Go see it.... that is all i will say

jameso

---
"The time has come," the walrus said. "To talk of many things..."



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Prevent sharing of Drop Box
Authored by: dave1212 on Nov 07, '03 11:11:53PM

That's quite funny.. and hippies are cool.

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______
http://www.68kmla.ca/



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Not Exactly A Drop Box
Authored by: dontlikehippies on Nov 13, '03 08:16:24PM

I probably should have mentioned that my drop box was, for some reason, not a drop box. I'm not sure why, but everything in the folder was globally readable.



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Not Exactly A Drop Box
Authored by: rhi on May 27, '04 11:54:28PM

I am having the opposite problem...and I know I'm kind of starting a new thread here but I wasnt sure where else to post a plea...

We use drop boxes where I work to put our shared client files so that all our designers have access to them. So we want them to be fully accessible.

The problem is, no matter how many times you tell it to allow read and write to guests or anyone it likes to revert back by itself.

The button to 'apply to all enclosed items' does nothing...certainly doesnt apply anything to any enclosed items.

To compound this, if a someone actually makes a folder across the network, in someone else's drop box, the person whose computer it is on doesnt even have access to it!

All this is annoying but livable...it has just got worse however. I'm now trying to archive some stuff onto cd and I cant burn it cause half of it is from other people's computers originally and the permissions are all screwed. It looks like I have to go through and individually change each items permissions!!

I've already made 5 coasters trying to get it to work.

Can anybody help?

I'm using 10.2.8



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