[Mr Ti]

HI,

I am looking for some help in setting up a basic office network.

I have recently set up an 8 machine network peer to peer using PC's and Win 98/2000. However I have a new venture and would like to use Macs.

I have been into Macs since 99, I bought a bondi, then a iMac 500, and I have a Ti. And although I understand just about everything I need to about my machines I have never known how to do some of the basic network stuff I do with PC's

The office setup will have an ethernet hub (not wireless/airport) , and the machines are likely to be basic iMac 2's. I would run Jag (I have this on my Ti/iMac 500) on all.

The features I do not know how replicate on the Mac are

1)How do I 'map network drives'?

2)How do I automatically get them to see each other on boot up (workgroup style), and have HD's automatically on the desktop(like network neighbourhood)?

3)How do I share to a colour laser?

I can do most of this independantly (manually), but for other users I need these features without having to 'connect server' by the user.

I am not familiar with all the protocols like DHCP etc. I do know about IP addresses though, TCP/IP is how the protocol for the peer-peer network was setup.

Any help with how to set this up will be fully appreciated.

Thanks in advance

[philzilla]

Originally posted by Mr Ti:
1)How do I 'map network drives'?

2)How do I automatically get them to see each other on boot up (workgroup style), and have HD's automatically on the desktop(like network neighbourhood)?

i was just looking for something else to do with login, and saw a few hints here, that might assist you with these two. if that url goes mental, i just searched for 'login'

can't help with the printer issue, but i hope that helps you a bit. try searching that same site, you might find an answer

laters

[Mr Ti]

Thanks for that, I'll keep looking. I'm sure this is easy it's just the getting started.

[John Strung]

In the first place, buy a switch not a hub. Switches are only marginally more expensive and are hugely more efficient. With a hub only two computers on the network can "talk" at once. If computer A is talking to B, then C can't talk to D. So they all have to take turns effectively dividing your bandwidth by the number of ports. Switches can communicate on all ports at once giving each port the full bandwidth. Secondly, switches can run full duplex (i.e. send and receive at the same time) which hubs can't.

As far as the printer goes, if you get a networkable printer (i.e. one with built-in ethernet) all you have to do is to plug it into your switch.

[10tcjackso]

I think you may have the hub and switch reversed. My hub does everything your "switch" does....

[ghporter]

By definition a hub is a device that effectively connects each port's transmit pair to all the other ports' receive pairs. There is limited waveshaping and timing, though there may be some data limiting and regeneration. There is no interaction with the data.

By definition a switch examines the addresses in the header of each packet coming in, and intelligently connects that packet to its intended destination. Lots of processing goes on to read the packets, the TTL field is (usually) decremented for each packet that passes through, and in consumer models there is some routing involved, both between the LAN side ports and through the WAN side.

Bottom line: hubs are passive, dumb devices, while switches (and consumer routers) are active, intelligent devices. Mr. Ti would be much better off spending the small extra money to buy a switch of any kind.

[Mr Ti]

Thanks,

I think I'll be buying an ethernet router box. I'm still looking for advice on which protocol is best, is TCP IP addressing the corrct way forward. I have no experience of DHCP or any of the other approaches.

If anyone has the time/patience I would appreciate an explanation of what pros/cons exist with the various protocols for my proposed setup.

Thank again

[ilukas]

automount servers at login (from macosxhints):

…if you manually mount a server (cmd-K) and then drag the mounted server icon to your Login items window (in System Preferences), your system will automount them at startup. No password/login screen; it's just done.


i have not a clue what you mean by 'map network drives'. with jag the laser printer will just work.

oh, one more thing: if you're only using jaguar on all macs, you can use their rendezvous names to mount the drives. you could mount imac2.local or janesmac.local, for example, so you don't have to worry about their IP addresses changing.