When we were releasing SymSMB 2.00 we announced that a smartphone empowered by SymSMB 2.00 would truly become a mobile networking computer. The user can access not only the phone from the computer, but also vice versa. Therefore, everything that is accessible by the computer as a network share is now also accessible by the smartphone.
If a smartphone is now a networking computer, it should be able to establish a sharing session with another networking computer. A reasonable question then is - can the other computer also be a smartphone empowered by SymSMB 2.00? Or in other words - is it possible to establish such a kind of connection between two phones?
Piece of cake!
Such capabilities are available in the settings for SymSMB 2.00. We know that a set of our users have already discovered this option and tried it out in real life. We believe it would be beneficial now to make this clear to everyone.
Let's demonstrate it using the following example.
Let's suppose John owns an N91 while his girlfriend Stacy has an E60. During a party John takes a bunch of pictures on his N91 and Stacy wants to get them onto her E60 right away. They will not even consider using a computer of Hugh (the party owner) as an option. Why not? First, it would take a while; second, it is necessary to find a USB cable (a long shot during a party); lastly and most importantly - both John and Stacy instead have SymSMB 2.00 installed on their phones. Another important aspect is that Hugh has a wireless router for which both John and Stacy have setup WLAN access points (while demonstrating Hugh the features of SymSMB 2.00).
So what is the situation from SymSMB 2.00 perspective?
John is the owner of content (photos) which Stacy would like to receive. In order for Stacy to access it, John should:
1) Give Stacy permissions to access his phone.
2) Share the folder with photos (most likely E:\Images) and give Stacy permissions for access to this shared location.
3) Start the SymSMB connection set up for Hugh's router.
4) Tell Stacy the name of the connection, shared location and her account settings for John's smartphone
From Stacy's side, John's smartphone is just a "network computer" which she needs to access. Therefore Stacy should:
5) Create an account to access John's photos based on the information provided by John
6) Set up the shared location containing John's photos as another "Network Drive"
...that's it.
After taking these steps Stacy accesses John's network drive from her browser and copies the photos somewhere onto her phone. After copying is complete, John stops the connection and the photos folder will not be accessible externally until he starts the connection again. Then the happy friends return to the party.
As you can see everything is quite simple and can be done in few trivial steps.
Now let's go over each step in detail.
We begin with John.
1) Give Stacy permissions to access his phone.
Go to "Options > Settings > Accounts > Options > New" and create a new account with the following parameters (for example):
2) Share the folder with photos (most likely E:\Images) and give Stacy access to this shared location.
Switch to the "Shared folders" section and create a new shared folder for the directory with images:
Add permissions for this folder to Stacy's account ("Read" is probably enough)
Note that even though a user may have an entry in the SymSMB Accounts section that does not automatically give one a permission to access any of the phone's locations. Such permission needs to be explicitly bound to specific resource.
3) Start the SymSMB connection set up for Hugh's router.
We previously mentioned that John already set up a connection which can be used in Hugh's home while demonstrating SymSMB 2.00 features. (So he created an access point for WLAN in Hugh's home and bound it to this connection).
By starting this connection, John finally triggers access to the photos for Stacy. However, it only makes accessible the locations specified in "Shared Folders" and only to users in "Accounts" bound to the corresponding share. At any moment the phone owner can stop the connection and the access to the phone will be denied. Therefore, the security of content on the phone literally is in the hands of the owner.
So the connection is started and the location is accessible, however Stacy does not yet know of this because John still has to...
4) Tell Stacy the name of the connection, shared location and his account settings for John's smartphone.
Only after this step (unless John and Stacy agreed on details beforehand) Stacy can begin setting up her phone:
5) Create account to access John's photos based on the information provided by John.
The account parameters on both phones should be identical.
6) Set up the shared location containing John's photos as another "Network Drive".
Here it is most important to set up the settings for "Network Drive". In this case:
- "Name" - not too important - let's define it as PhotosFromJohnN91;
- "Drive" - not too important - let's define it as "P:\" drive;
- "Access point" - Stacy should point the access point turned to be used in Hugh's apartment;
- "Account" - important - should be the account, created in 5) - Friends\Stacy;
- "Host" - important - should be the name of started connection of John's phone - HughHome;
- "Share" - important - should be the name of the "Shared folder" from John's phone - JohnImages;
This is it - John's shared location now appears as a network drive on Stacy's phone and she can start using it.
On the left below is the browser view of the photos directory on John's phone. To the right is the view of this content on Stacy's phone.
Copying the content onto the local drive is trivial.
The task is complete. As you can see it was neither complicated nor scary. In fact reading this example took longer than it would require performing this task in real life.
The examined example is universal for setting up a connection between two phones. However, some variations are possible:
- type of permissions for the user - allow "Write" or not;
- when going into a different wireless area - access points, "Connection" or "Network Drive" should be adjusted to new environment;
The rest is the same 6 easy steps as above.
In other example Stacy was downloading content from John's phone. Simultaneously, the transfer in the opposite direction is possible. For example, John might want to download a video clip from Stacy's phone. In this case, from SymSMB perspective Stacy now must share that phone location with a video clip while John will map it as a network drive. To perform this task they would need the 6 steps as before except with the roles switched.
However this should be a matter of small details and we leave this as an exercise to you.