PC/Mac - how to network together?

[OpticalPrime]

Hey all, sorry for the dumb question. Im hoping its a simple solution.

I have 3 PCs and 1 Macbook at my house. One PC is my sons computer for games, etc... Another is my work computer (home business), and last PC was my personal computer for photos, videos, etc.. until I bought the Macbook recently.

So I basically have 4 computers at the house. I have ATT DSL and a wireless router hooked up to my original PC. I then connect the other 3 computers to internet via wirelessly...

Here is my question. I was given a 320GB external hard drive to me for free from a friend. I want to try and sort through all my photos, videos, files and store them on this drive.

Is there a way I can easily network all my computers together so I can share files between them all? As well as this external hard drive?

Also, is there a way when Im away from the house I can log into my network and download a file or something?

Thansk and again, sorry for my ignorance.

[Dobick]

I had a mac laptop at one point, but it is not operational anymore, so I am kinda shootin' from the hip on this one.

If I remember correctly, the easiest way was to find the folders that you want shared on a windows machine, and right click and go to the sharing option. From there you will share the folder with a name (you can call it share, or anything, but make it easy to remember) You will also want to give permissions to "everyone" and you will have to decide whether you want them to have full read write and delete priveleges, or just be able to access them.

Once that is done, you will need to know the internal ip address of the machine that has the shares. If you are hooked to a linksys router it will likely be 192.168.0.? (you can go to the command prompt and type in the following to find out the info "ipconfig" without the quotes.)

I don't know what the latest iteration of mac osx uses to connect to another pc, but there is an option that you can choose in there from the main window that will allow you to connect to a pc/map a network drive. At this point you can type in the address in the following way:

"\\192.168.0.101\share" and choose an open drive letter.

(this is assuming two things 1. that the ip address of the machine with the share is 192.168.0.101, and you called the share point "share")

It should then place an icon on your desktop which will act fairly familiar.


At least that is the best that I can remember.

GL and I reserve all normal disclaimers of if you blow up your crap, you are on your own

[The Ben]

run dual boot on your mac and run something like VNC on it.

[OpticalPrime]

this sounds like it would work, thanks. Iv never done anything like that before. I guess with the new external drive plugged into one of my PCs, I could "share" that entire drive right?

Guess I need to figure out how to share files on the Mac and also how to log into my IP and looks like Ill be good.

[Spec A!]

Here's a starting point, I'm sure you can find help on the rest if you search a little more in depth.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.h...5/en/8204.html