[Velda]

I have two macs running Leopard 10.5.2, one ppc mac mini and a new MBP. The mac mini serves a hard drive on the network with my movies and music on it. The network is an airport extreme but the ppc mac mini has no pre N card so to boost the transfer from the mini to the laptop I ran ethernet between them on my desk.

The problem is, leopard will only use the significantly faster ethernet to transfer files between the two computers if i turn off the airport connection on one of the two machines, even tho ethernet is higher on the list than airport in the network configuration on my laptop.

I realized a sort of compromise solution, using internet sharing to share the minis internet from wifi over ethernet and then leaving the airport off on the laptop, but then the laptop is super slow talking to the other mac computer in the other room thats wired to the n-capable router. I cant do it the other way around (sharing the laptops wifi internet with the mini) because the entire point of the mini is that it can share files and download while im out traveling with the laptop.

Isnt there some way OSX should be able to realize they can share files faster between the two over ethernet while still using airport for internet? I could have sworn Tiger did this on its own before.

thanks in advance for any assistance.

[Velda]

I spent about a half hour today dorking around with the problem and discovered a little way around the problem, tho certainly not a good solution.

If you connect via ethernet to the mini, then mount it, then connect to the wifi network, it will use the ethernet to transfer to and from the mini. This helps, but i really think the OS should be smart enough to figure this out on its own, shouldnt it?

[ghporter]

I think the more salient issue is "how does OS X know what you're trying to do?" Your two different adapters could be connected to completely different networks-even though they may have similar IP addresses. So OS X just uses the connection it has from one device to another and you get what you get. I don't know of any way to tell Leopard "all my adapters are on the same network, and I want you to use the fastest one-even though they're all validly connected."