Q: Unknown "PC Servers" in Finder
My home network runs on an Airport Extreme. We have two MacBook Pros running El Capitan, an old G5 iMac running OS 10.5.8, a Bonjour networked laser printer, a wireless scanner/printer, a smart TV and a "micro cell" signal booster for my mobile phone. There are three shared devices showing up in the finder of my old G5 iMac that identify themselves as "PC Servers". Two of the three devices use names that are variations of my wife's MacBook Pro name: “******” Macbook Pro". The two device names are "jjmacbookpro" and "MacBook Pro-b0ae". The third device has the identity "npide8e69. I've added a picture of the relevant section of the finder window.
Demonstrating my networking ignorance, I'm worried this "PC Servers" are bots, or something similar, that have infected my wife's laptop. Thoughts? How can I identify what these "PC Servers" are? When I highlight them and choose "Get Info" there's no information other than "Kind: PC Server".
<Edited by Host>
MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2009), OS X El Capitan (10.11), null
Posted on Feb 24, 2016 9:29 AM
This should be totally innocuous. Your wife's macbook probably has file sharing activated, and within that file sharing using smb.
You can go to System Preferences->Sharing on that machine, click on File Sharing, and then click the Options button and see if it looks somewhat like this:
The "PC" server is just the mac serving files over smb. You can turn that option off, if you like, or restrict its access to specific user accounts on that mac.
Posted on Feb 24, 2016 2:53 PM


