Well, if you buy a Time Capsule, it works easily as an Apple network disk, but what about as a file server for Windows machines. This is a bit tricky, because of mapping, but basically, if you set it up to. By the way a *big limitation is that the Time Capsule name must be 27 characters or less, so beware*

Apple name is

bq. Rich’s Time Capsule

The Netbios name that you need to type into Windows is

bq. \richs-time-capsule.local\

So you can see that you can either have a nice Apple name, or the usual hashed out Windows name, but not both. Personally, I go with nice looking Apple name and live with long file server names.

The default disk is Time Capule, so to access it on a PC:

bq. \richs-time-capsule.local\Time Capsule

Also there is another issue, if you take the easy default which is that the password on the Time Capsule is the same as the hard disk, then the user name you have to fill out for Windows is that same as the Netbios name. That is, the user name ir _richs-time-capsule.local_ and the password is the password on the whole Time Capsule.

As an aside, Time Capsule does allow you to have users and passwords (these are of course separate from machine users and passwords). You set this up with the “Airport Utility”

Apple – Support – Discussions – time capsule “user name” problem …

Go into Airport Utility:
Select Time capsule > manual setup
There are five choices across the top – choose disks
Choose the file sharing tab:

Enable file sharing
enable share disks over ethernet WAN port

Secure Shared Disks: select “with accounts”
click on configure accounts:
click on + and add a username (keep it simple) and a password
Click update

I’m Rich & Co.

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