Share external FAT formatted drive over SMB in Mountain Lion

Question

I have an external drive formatted with FAT32. Is it somehow possible to share it using SMB in Mountain Lion? It appears on the client but with nothing on it. I have read that on older OS X versions, it was possible by editing /etc/smb.conf but is that still relevant? I don't seem to have one of those on my hard drive.

Answer 1

You don't have to manually edit a configuration file; it's possible to share drives via SMB using the Sharing control panel. Under the File Sharing service, hit the "Options..." button to enable SMB:

This will make your shared folders accessible via SMB to the specified users. It shouldn't matter what the source filesystem is (FAT, HFS, or other) as long as your Mac can access it.

If you don't see any contents from the client, make sure you've added your drive as a shared folder, and that you've given users the appropriate permissions.

Answer 2

There does not seem to be an answer for this, I went with smbup which "replaces" the Mac OS X SMB with an open source dito. The other option I have seen is to reformat it to a native mac format (but that is not an option for me)