[dennisbolt]

I included this in another semi-related thread (to no avail) and have exhaustively searched this and other websites. I want to use airport for more than just printign ans internet....

I have:
1. new 17" Powerbook with airport and OS10.3.3 and aiport extrme base station
2. G3 OS9.2 tower from 2001
3. new Epson C84 printer
4. Epson 1600 scanner from 2003
5. new maxtor external hard drive

Question:
How can I use airport to wirelessly print (can do this already), scan and access hardrive from my powerbook, as well as use the older desktop with all these peripherals as well?

Can I scan and access external HD wirelessly from PB, even if i had them hooked up to desktop?? I tried plugging scanner alone into airport and had no luck:-(, but plugged it works fine with Image Capture.

A usb hub would seem in order, but I would need a male-male usb cable to connect hub to airport basestation?? Or do I need another piece of hardware to truly network everything together?

Thanks-I am not new to mac, but new to OSX and the idea of networking.

[larkost]

USB is a host-centric technology, it assumes that one device is the root of the tree (the computer). You cannot have two computers in a single USB chain (there are a number of devices that simulate things like this, but are not what you are looking for).

That being said, there are lots of ways of sharing the devices over the network (that just happens to be wireless). If both computers were MacOS X 10.3, then you could share the scanner through image capture. With MacOS 9 I know of no solution.

It sounds like you already have the printer worked out.

The hard drive is a candidate for file sharing (look it up).

[aaanorton]

Originally posted by larkost:
The hard drive is a candidate for file sharing (look it up).

This may help with the HD, but it would need to be plugged into one of the computers, not the AEBS. As far as I know, only printers can be plugged into that USB port.

[dennisbolt]

Thanks. It sounds like airport is assumed to be just for printers and internet??

But since internet requires info to go from airport to computer ( 2-way communication), why couldn't a scanner work as well. I would have hoped that the airport is just like a really long usb cord-except that the info goes back and forth with radio rather than physical wires??

With this logic it would seem that all you need to do is to tackle the problem of only one usb port on he airport base station-which would lead me to a hub or some other physical sharing device. I would not be acessing th scanner from 2 computers at the same time.

All I want to do is negate having to unplug printer from the AEBS and move it to my desktop to print from the desktop machine...etc with external HD and scanner?

[aaanorton]

Originally posted by dennisbolt:
All I want to do is negate having to unplug printer from the AEBS and move it to my desktop to print from the desktop machine...etc with external HD and scanner?

Well, you can do this easily. Once the printer is set up on the AEBS, it will be avail to any comp on the LAN. That's the whole point.

[tooki]

OK here's the deal: the Airport base stations with USB don't provide some sort of "remote USB." It's a built-in print server for USB printers. The computer does not see the USB port any more, it sees a network printer.

In theory, could someone design scanner sharing? Sure. Has it been done much? No. Part of that no doubt has to do with the fact that unlike printers, there is very little, if any, standardization of scanner communication protocols. Each scanner (and the corresponding software) uses its own proprietary commands.

Mac OS X Panther provides built-in network sharing of any Image Capture-compatible devices. At the moment, that means digital cameras and a small number of Epson scanners.

Some scanners (like old UMAXes under classic Mac OS) provided their own network scanning software, but frankly, it stank. It never really worked right.

tooki