07-25-2011, 07:41 AM

For about 2 years now my mac appears as 2 separate macs one with file sharing and the other with screen sharing...

My problem is that i do not want to have people screen share my mac and i also sometimes want to stay anonymous when connecting to a network.

This all started back when i had just gotten snow leopard and decided to freshen up on my unix. I started writing small shell scripts, see if i crack my own password. But at some point i think i made a mistake that suddenly 2 computers were joining a network when i was the only one on it. I have connected to several networks and used my other mac to see whether it is not MY mac that is showing ghost computers.

Now i was waiting for lion to come to see whether this fixed my problems but it didn't. So now i am asking the forum whether they can help me.

ps: I don't remember what i wrote in the shell script that caused all this and i no longer have the file.

07-26-2011, 12:00 AM

If it is showing up as both you have file sharing and screen sharing enabled. I don't know what you scripts did - but assuming that it wasn't anything too bad - you should be able to go to Apple -> System Preferences -> sharing -> If it is normal you should see file sharing and screen sharing both selected. If you uncheck it here, your computer should stop showing up on the network, again assuming that your scripts didn't do anything funky.

07-28-2011, 12:04 PM

Thank you for your post but i mean that my mac shows up as 2 computers in the network as "Dgall's Mac" and "Dgall" one has filesharing while the other has screensharing even though i have turned it off in system preferences

07-28-2011, 12:52 PM

That is the way sharing works. If you have both enabled it ends up showing up as 2 computers. If you look closely the icons are actually different for screen sharing vs file sharing. If you click on the file share you get a finder window, if you click on the other you get a remote session login.

That being said - if it is disabled in the system preferences then my guess is your script set something at a low level that isn't affected by the GUI.

I have tried this with a Mac mini I have in the basement - running leopard, but I've seen the same thing with Snow Leopard. Clicking sharing off on that machine makes one of the 2 computer icons disappear (or both if they are both off) - and they come back when I turn them on.

I would say to be of more help you'd have to figure out what exactly your scripts did because if it is a low level plist write, or a /usr or /etc edit - you'd have to undo that.