3 posts tagged “network”
I am an avid Macintosh fan. If that's not already clear from reading my blog, I want to say it for the record. I'm geeked about the new Mac OS aptly titled Leopard coming next Friday the 26th of October and I'm also excited about the new Logic Studio 8 I've been playing around with lately, although I could use a new Mac so that I can play back my songs on it.
Where I work currently, we encourage people to use Macs for many reasons including the fact that you can actually have the Mac OS and Windows running side by side using Parallels software [Coherence mode is awesome!]. Another reason we recommend that new employees get Macs is because they have lots of extremely useful tools under the hood like BSD for starters and a terminal application appropriately called "Terminal" where Mac users can access the Unix kernel and configure their computers via a command line interface.
One of the questions that comes up often is "how can I share files with other Mac users or Mac computers on an internal network at home or at work?" At some offices, this might be more complicated because of Windows networking issues but with the three Macs I have here in the office or the two I use at home, this is so simple it's kind of hard to believe that I haven't been taking advantage of this feature for years.
To enable file sharing, go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences and click the Sharing Preference pane in the middle of the window under Internet & Network. If everything is set up correctly on your local network, click the Start button on the Sharing Preference page's Services tab and wait for it to finish the startup process.
Default options here are probably best but you can add additional services if desired in the services area.
To share files, make sure that the Firewall is Off under the Firewall tab. If you want to share your internet connection, click the Internet tab and click Start. I have never personally used the Share Connection option but I'm sure there's a good reason to have this feature and that someone somewhere is using it right now. Unfortunately, this feature is outside the scope of this blog post for now.
So, back to the important details. How is the shared Mac accessed from another machine you ask? First you need to know what the address of the shared computer is. By clicking the Sharing Preference pane with the Services tab selected, if Sharing is enabled [Personal File Sharing should definitely be checked as well] some text that says the following appears near the bottom of the Preference pane window when Sharing is the currently selected preference pane and when File Sharing is enabled:
"Other Macintosh users can access your computer at afp://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/ or browse for "username" by choosing Network from the Go menu in the Finder."
So, from any other computer that is not explicitly blocked from accessing other machines on the network, the address is what is specified in that sentence.
From another networked Macintosh computer, choose Connect To Server from the Finder's Go menu. Enter the address that appeared in the shared computer's Sharing Preference panel and click the + button to add the address to the list. Keep in mind that if you're network is running a DHCP server [dynamically allocated internal IP address server], this address will probably change often so it might be necessary to recheck it the next time you want to connect to the shared computer. If you try to connect to an address that worked previously, double-check that the address has not been changed since the last connection was made.
Once the address has been added to the list, click the item in the list of Favorite Servers and then click Connect. You will be prompted to enter a username and password for the remote machine.
This brings up a separate issue. It will likely be necessary to create accounts on the shared computer so that you can access all of the folders and drives associated with it. Go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences > Accounts Preference pane and enable Guest access, or create new accounts with specific access rules as necessary. Guest access will allow you to see the Public folder and the Share folder with restrictions on many folders.
In the Accounts window click the Lock to change settings for a given user account or to add Guest access to your computer. keep in mind that with default settings, only the Public folder that appears in your user's home directory should be accessible to other users unless you log in as you from the remote machine. Also noteworthy is the drop box folder where guests and other users that are not you can drop files and folders for you even though they can't see the contents of the folder.
Good luck and happy sharing on the Mac.
This might come as a shock to some folks but some of us don't know as much about our computers as we would like to and when some obvious question that no one nas ever asked before comes up and you figure it out, it's always nice to share with others what you discovered. Some people reading this post might be saying "well, duh!" when they've finished reading it but some folks will appreciate what I'm about to enlighten them about.
First of all, if you're not a Mac OS X user, this post won't interest you. Move on to the next one, unless you have some geeky, maudlin curiosity about how the other [and in my opinion better] 10 percent of computer users lives and breathes. Or, maybe you just want to ask the same question about the PC to find the answer and decide once again that your choice of computer is still better than the Mac, despite what you've heard from your programming friends. By all means, go ahead. Be a PC user. I don't care. If you wanna use a craptacular OS, good right ahead and be my guest. And please don't leave me any comments about Mac vs. PC because I just don't care. Get a job at Microsoft and suck on Bill's tit all the way up to Redmond if you want.
Now that we've gotten rid of the PC punters, has anyone ever wondered if there is any logic to the order that your computer connects to a given network like say, the Internet?
Someone came by my cube at work the other day and asked me if there was any rhyme or reason to the order that Macs connect to a given network, more specifically in most cases meaning the Internet, or as one of our glorious politicians likes to describe it, "the Series of Toobs" or "The Toobs" for short; Don't put a big truck on "The Toobs" either; Senator Ted Stevens says the truck might get stuck on the Toobs.
While I was trying to figure out the cryptic art of file sharing last night I stumbled on a feature that I hadn't noticed in the Network System Preference Panel that answers this very question of what order the OS uses to connect to the Internet given multiple available interfaces.
Go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences: Click Network and select the Network Port Configurations item from the Show pop-up [PC users: drop down; why is the PC terminology so negative?] that appears below the Location pop-up on the Network preference panel.
On this page, you can check and uncheck Port Configurations that you want or don't want active [Built-In FireWire for Networking? I guess that's a possibility but not for me and Blue-tooth would be a last resort connection option; dow to the bottom for Bluetooth]. I disabled Built-In FireWire by clicking its checkbox to uncheck it.
After enabling what you want to use to connect to the Toobs via a "Network" dragging the items in the list up or down determines the order used for each interface to connect to the network. Logically, if I have an Ethernet cable connected to my computer, I want to use that pipe over my Airport connection because Ethernet is much faster and AirPort or 802.11g/b/a/n is much slower.
So... Built-In Ethernet to the top. AirPort second even though that's the one I'll be using most often at the house followed by Bluetooth and finally Internal Modem for when I go back in tech time to beautiful Prescott Arizona to visit mom and have to slide down the 56K toob known as dial-up. Yuch.
So, if anyone ever asks if there's any logic used to determine which port or interface to use to connect to the Internet or a *network* I can answer that question for a Mac user. I have no idea how this all sorts out on Windows Vista or in XP though. I'm sure someone has already posted this note for PC users somewhere.
I just finished reading the Wall Street Journal article about a particular audio clip spoof that was created and posted to Digg using Ted Steven's ridiculous comments during the recent congressional Network Neutrality debate. The senator's comments were also lambasted by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.
The spoofed clip was created by Paul Holcomb, an advertising executive and podcaster on his company's boldheaded.com site. Holcomb created the wildly popular DJ Tubular Ted Stevens Techno Remix audio clip as a comedic take on senator Ted Steven's now infamous comments about how the Internet works, slicing and dicing choice tid bits from the dysfunctional speech to fit a campy, techno-house beat.
Oddly enough, at the time he posted the clip, Holcomb wasn't completely aware of the functional and political ramifications of the Net Neutrality debate. Since then, the spoofed speech remix has been downloaded from his site alone over 70,000 times since he posted it, according to the article, and there's also a music video posted by a fan of the remix on YouTube.com that has been viewed more than 200,000 times.
What's funny about all of this is, Captain Tubular Ted Stevens still thinks he's right about how the internet works [it's a series of tubes after all] and that everyone else is wrong. Additionally humorous, Holcomb is a conservative Air Force veteran and after the audio clip went completely viral on the net, he had reporters from all sides of the issue calling him to ask if he could explain Net Neutrality for their blogs and news articles, as well as people from left wing sites like CrooksAndLiars.com re-posting the remix approvingly and MoveOn.Org proclaiming the clip as one of "10 examples of grassroots lobbying on the tube-net".
I guess Mr. Holcomb learned a valuable lesson from all of this: you have to be careful about what you post on the tubes, otherwise, they can get all gunked up with thousands of downloads of Internets audio clips that make fun of ignorant, conservative, republican chairmans of the Senate Commerce Committee and people just might think you're a bleedin' heart liberal commie prick. Apparently Holcomb, showing his good sense, ultimately came out on the side of Neutrality after educating himself via "the tubes". Now, if we could only get Ted Stevens on the right path.
Darin "Commie Prick" Marshall
