Network your home PC and Mac > Part II - Getting your Mac to "act" like a PCStep 4 - Connecting and sharing resources Now with Dave fully installed on our Mac, we only need to take a few final steps to get up and running with our Mac to PC network. Back on the PC make sure that you have file and printer sharing turned on and have shared a drive. For our example, we have the C drive shared. (Again, for complete instructions see Step 4 in our Ethernet How To). As a reminder, you simply right click on the drive or folder you want to share from within Windows Explorer or My Computer. The dialog box that pops up will look like this. Simply provide a share name, select whether it is read only, full share or depends on a password and select OK. Now anyone on the network, and in this case the Mac using Dave, will be able to share the files in this drive.
Next, over on the Mac, make sure that Sharing is turned on and that a resource is shared. We covered that in-depth in Part I of this Mac to PC How to in Step 2. For this example, we have shared a folder called "Temp." Finally, you need to connect to the network from your Mac. In this case, Dave is acting like a "client" to the PC network. Select Chooser from the Apple Menu. You'll see the usual components on the left side including Appleshare and any installed printers. You should also see the icon for Dave labeled as "Dave Client". Select this and you'll need to wait some time for the PC "server" to appear. In this example, our PC "T266" appears. Select the PC and click on OK.
Now a dialog box will appear showing all of the shared resources on the PC. In our case, we shared the C drive and it appears as shown below. Simply select the shared resource and click OK. Note that you can check the box to ensure that the shared resource is automatically mounted and available the next time you start the Mac. There are several other options that we won't bother to go into for this short how to. Suffice it to say that Dave offers lots of other good features for complete networking between PC and Macs.
After you select OK and a short pause, the C drive icon will appear on the desktop of your Mac. You can doubleclick on it just like any other drive or folder on your desktop and have complete access. Since we also shared a resource on the Mac (the Temp folder), we can also go to the PC and see that shared resource. Although the Mac should come up in Network Neighborhood, it didn't always do so for us. (We do not, by the way, blame the Thursby software for this. In our experience, even on PC to PC networking, Network Neighborhood doesn't always show other machines.) The true test, then, is to map a network drive to the shared resource on the Mac. To do that, click on the Map Network Drive button on your tool bar OR select Tools and map network drive from the Explorer menu and insert the name of the Mac and the shared resource as shown here. Select OK and a window will appear with all of the contents of the Mac folder.
That's it. You've networked your Mac and PC. Congratulations. For a wrap up on Part II and some thoughts on Thursby's Dave, read on to the Summary page.
All content © 1998-2007 by homePCnetwork, inc.
|
