Simple Mac/PC Network

June 16, 2009 4:57 PM

I have an old iBook G4 (Tiger) that I would like to use as a low-budget "media server". I'd like to set it up with an external hard drive so that our other two computers (laptop running Vista and netbook running XP) can access its files over our wireless network.

I'm pretty clueless with networking stuff, but I'm able to set up a workgroup so that I can view the iBook's files from the PCs. I'm not able to get to the external hard drives, though. I thought I'd be able to put aliases to these drives in the iBook's home directory and navigate over to it, but that didn't work.

The hard drive is currently formatted for Mac OS, which I understand isn't readable by a PC without a program like MacDrive. If I reformatted the drive as FAT32 (or bought a copy of MacDrive), would I be able to access files from one of the Windows computers?

Also (less importantly), I'm not able to get to the Windows computers from the Mac. I've gone through some online tutorials but they seem mainly focused on PC/PC networks or Mac/Mac networks, and/or they assume that I'm running Leopard.

I thought that this would be pretty easy to Google a solution to, but so far I'm stuck.

posted by rossination to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Set up additional Samba shares to your hard drives, which makes them visible to other Windows workstations. You can use something like Swift Share or SharePoints to make this easier.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:52 PM on June 16, 2009 [1 favorite]

I thought I'd be able to put aliases to these drives in the iBook's home directory and navigate over to it, but that didn't work.

I have a setup like this and just made a softlink in my home directory to the shared drive, eg:

~# ln -s /Volumes/Disk ~/



It's not the prettiest or most convenient thing, but it works.
posted by pompomtom at 6:18 PM on June 16, 2009

(on checking BP's links: do that. Fixing your smb.conf is the correct way to do this...)
posted by pompomtom at 6:20 PM on June 16, 2009