Helo Josie,

> eventually gave up. So I decided to try again yesterday and I finally got
> it working... at least so it seems.

glad you did it!

> What's bothering me is that the files exist in coda land. It's not like a
> way of accessing files from other peoples computers.

No, and you are right, this is a common mistake.

It seems amazing that many system administrators (the assumed audience
reading about Coda) are not familiar with global file systems concepts
present for many years and deployed widely in the world.
The most popular of such fs is AFS and there is a lot of information about
it.

In general, it is impossible to export local file system semantics in a
portable way, across different [local] filesystems and different
platforms.

> As I now understand it that is just a flawed idea because you copy things
> into coda and that is how they get shared. My point is that I am not alone
> in this misconception.... all of my friends that I've talked to about

Probably it is worth a faq entry in big red letters:

 - to share a content of a filetree you
     COPY ITS CONTENTS TO UNDER /coda via a CLIENT
   on the server you provide just the PLACE for files coming from CLIENTS

:-)

> coda are under the same impression I was under 15 minutes ago. (no wonder
> everyone fails to make it work)

I think that unfortunately an administrator has to know/learn more than
just "filespace-" vs "files-" export difference, to be able to run a Coda
realm.
On the other side, for helping the first glance of newcomers your notice
makes a real sence!

> (there isn't someway that I could make it "publish" files from my
> filesystem?)

Alas, your filesystem *lacks* the necessary properties to be able to be
exported by Coda. No offence meant. Coda offers very special properties
that are hardly synchronizable with other "access paths", i.e if you'd
insist on accessing your files via the local filesystem.

The possible solution is to move the filesystem disk to a server (or
*may be* run a server on the host in question, using the filesystem as a
storage), but then you have to
1. make a temporary copy of your data
2. give the physical disk space to the coda server
3. copy the data via a client (possibly the same host as the server)

then the data
- is located on the same physical disk, and is accessible everywhere, it
is what you wanted :)
- BUT you cannot access it going past Coda anymore, so it is possibly not
what you desired (having a "shortcut" to the data)

It *would* be possible to provide an alternative interface to Coda files,
say for the superuser on the server host, going past all authorization
checks, but it is definitely not the same thing as "exporting existing
files". Such addition would need some effort and does not seem to be very
important (imho!).

Regards,
--
Ivan