How to configure/send http links to files on a drive?

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Level 1

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How to configure/send http links to files on a drive?

We recently switched over to a Mac-based file server for our small business from a Windows server after a hardware failure. Previously we were able to send HTTP links (I believe using FTP?) to clients that linked directly to video files on one of the drives within the server, which would play back in a browser window or could be downloaded by saving the link. I'm now trying to figure out how to add this functionality to the new server. I'm not an IT guy so this is all kind of Italian to me. All I'm looking for is someone to point me in the right direction.

What I do know is that the old links were formatted as such:

zcg911.us/_clients/cintas/example.mov

There was a drive attached to the server we labeled "htdocs" which contained the "_clients" folder, and was being linked to. Basically I just want to replicate this functionality so we can resume sending out links to our clients in this way.

Is this something I can do with the OS X Server app? Or do I need third-party software to accomplish this? Any help would be hugely appreciated.

Posted on Feb 27, 2015 9:31 AM

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Answer 1

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Mar 1, 2015 8:23 AM in response to DanSudkamp

Activate the FTP service. See the built-in help for details.

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Answer 2

Mar 2, 2015 2:47 AM in response to DanSudkamp

For http links to work in this case you need a web server which can access those files and then 'serve' them via http. Such a URL would look something like

http://mywebsever.domain.com/_clients/cintas/example.mov

The web server could be the file server and this would make things easier but it could be logged in to the file server as a client itself.

If you simply add a folder or folders to the web server so it can share these to clients, you need to make sure no other files are in the same folders that you do not want to make available to other people. Either this means ensuring only the files you want are in those folders, or instead of sharing the folders themselves, you could make aliases, aka. 'shortcuts', aka. 'links' to the individual files and putting those aliases in the website folder.

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