Sharing the Harmony Database Files Using Samba on macOS

Sharing the database folders on a macOS server via Samba is only required if you intend to have clients running Windows, as Windows does not natively support connecting to NFS shares. However, the implementation of Samba that is natively bundled with macOS does not work with Harmony Server. Therefore, to make your macOS-based Harmony database server accessible from Windows clients, you must disable the implementation of Samba that is bundled with macOS, and then install and configure the open source implementation of Samba instead. The most straightforward way is to install the open source implementation of Samba is by using the MacPorts package manager.

After that, you will need to:

  1. Configure a Samba share for each database and scene data folder on your server, as well as for the Harmony installation itself.
  2. Creating a Samba username and password, which will be needed to access the Samba shares from a remote computer.
  3. Creating and activating launch daemons for Samba, so that it automatically runs in the background when the computer is running.
IMPORTANT Since this procedure requires installing and configuring a third party software, consider these instructions as indicative only. Using Samba to connect to a macOS based Harmony server cannot be guaranteed to succeed and, even if it succeeds, it is always possible that a future update or upgrade of macOS makes this method no longer work.