OS 9 and OS X computers cannot communicate after upgrade to 10.6

Question

I still have a beige G3 Mac running OS 9.1. that has legacy programs and peripherals that I still need. I have always been able to interconnect both ways with my OS 10.5 computer via my wired Ethernet. This week, I upgraded to to OS 10.6 and now I get error messages saying that the other server cannot be accessed. The OS 9 machine says that the OS 10.6 computer is running an incompatible version of the afp protocol. Any ideas on how to overcome this problem?

Answer 1

I have a similar setup : a number of Macs (Mac Pro) running OS X 10.6.1 and one G4 with two partitions, one with OS X 10.4.11 and one with system 9.2.2. This one is for older apps and peripherals. We need to be able to transfer files easily from this one to the others, and back.
After a bit of fiddling I got it to work on my setup, but I'm not really sure what steps are really necessary. I tried a number of things in succession and finally got it to work. So I'll just describe the working situation. What I did was set up one shared folder on the old mac, under system 9, and connected the newer Macs to this folder, through the network.
Loaded Extensions and Control Panels (on the old Mac):
File Sharing
File Sharing Extension
ShareWay IP Personal Bgnd (provided by Apple)
In the File Sharing Control Panel:
In the Start/Stop tab
In the Network identity zone:
Put the "Owner Name" (use one word, lower case): jdoe
Owner Password : choose one, don't leave it empty
Computer Name (one word, lower case): oldmac
In the File Sharing zone:
start sharing
select Enable File Sharing clients to connect over TCP/IP
In the "Users & Groups" tab:
open the configuration dialog for jdoe
the pop-up menu must be set to Sharing
select "Allow user to connect to this computer"
unselect "Allow user to see all disks"
Create a group, for instance "staff"
drag jdoe into the configuration dialog so that he is added to the "staff" group
Quit (or close) File Sharing
In the Finder, get info for the folder you want to share on the old mac
set the pop-up to Sharing
select "Share this item and its contents"
set the Owner to jdoe with Read and Write permissions
set the User/Group to "staff" with Read only
Go to the other Mac running Snow Leopard on the same network.
In the Finder's "Go" menu, choose "Connect to Server"
In the dialog that comes up, under "Server Address", enter the IP number of the System 9 machine, for example afp://192.168.1.212
Click on Connect
In the second dialog that comes up, enter the owner and password that you previously set on system 9
The shared folder from System 9 appears immediately in the Finder
Hope this helps.