Network your home PC and Mac > Part II - Getting your Mac to "act" like a PCStep 1 - Configuring TCP/IP on the Mac software As the instruction manual for Dave clearly points out, you must have TCP/IP properly configured before starting installation of the software. Oddly, the company decided to put those configuration steps hidden back in Appendix D. As always, we'll take the real world approach and discuss that configuration first. As we discussed in the overview, nearly all Macs already will have the necessary network software installed. If you don't see some of the options we describe below on your Mac, get out your most recent system software diskettes or CD-ROM and reinstall the software, making sure to include the networking components. With most 7.x systems, this will include the MacTCP control panel. In most 8.x systems, this will include the Open Transport TCP/IP control panel. First, let's look at the MacTCP setup. To begin, go the Apple Menu, scroll to the Control Panels and select Network. When the Network configuration box appears, simply click on Ethertalk (versus the built-in Appletalk) and close the window.
Next, go back to Apple Menu > Control Panels and select MacTCP. When the dialog box appears, make sure Ethernet is clicked and type in the TCP/IP address for that Mac computer. For this how to, we'll use 192.168.0.x (with x a number from 1 to 10 for each computer on our network). For our test setup, we'll give the advanced PC test machine (named T266) the address 192.168.0.1 and the Mac (named LC475) the IP address 192.168.0.2. It should look like this:
Click on "More..." to complete the TCP/IP configuration on the Mac. In the larger window that opens, make sure to set the subnet mask to 255.255.255.0. You do this by using the slider bar just below the number. Also, you MUST include a gateway address. For this simple setup, you can insert the address of the PC machine that will act as the "server." Thus, simply type in 192.168.0.1. If you are putting the Mac onto a larger network with a Domain Name Server and other features, you'll need to add additional information here, but that's beyond the scope of this how to. The expanded configuration should look like this:
Using Open Transport, the setup is a bit easier. There is no Network control panel to deal with. So, again go to the Apple Menu, select Control Panels and select TCP/IP. The Open Transport configuration screen will open. At the top, make sure ethernet is selected and next select "manually" to insert your address. Again, type in the TCP address for the Mac (192.168.0.2 in our example) and the subnet mask (255.255.255.0). Open Transport does not require a gateway address. When you close the dialog box, you'll be asked to save the configuration. Do so. And then restart your Mac. Here's what this looks like:
Now, since our simple peer-to-peer network is running solely on TCP/IP and we do not have a domain name server or windows index name server running, we need one final, manual step to insure that we can use our computer names across the network. Go into your System folder and look for the Preferences folder. Inside there you should find a file called "LMHOSTS Sample." Open it with SimpleText and follow the instructions to add the name and IP address for the two computers. For our example, that entails simply typing two lines at the end of the file: 192.168.0.1 T266 192.168.0.2 LC475 Save the file as LMHOSTS (drop the sample) and restart your Mac. Now, your computers will be known by their names to you and by their IP addresses to the other computers. That's all for now on the Mac. Thursby recommends using a "ping" utility to make sure that TCP/IP is configured properly and working between the two machines. If you are completely new to networking and TCP/IP, we agree that is a good idea. We pinged extensively as we hooked up our test system and it did, indeed, help us discover a problem with our network card on the PC. For a ping utility for the Mac, go to Thursby's web site at www.thursby.com. For a PC ping utility you simply need to open a DOS box while in Windows and type ping + the network address. For our test example, we would type "ping 192.168.0.2". If the response is anything other than "reply from 192.168.0.2" along with some other information, than you have a problem. Let's move on to Step 2 where we'll install the necessary network software on the PC and configure it properly.
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