Easy Mac OS X Lion - Kate Binder [55]
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Creating an Airport Network
You’ll find Wi-Fi networks almost everywhere you go these days—coffee shops, airports, along your city’s main street, even at McDonald’s. Nice, isn’t it? Why forgo such luxury at home? It’s so easy to set up your own AirPort and provide Wi-Fi for yourself and your guests to use with computers, iPods, iPads, and all the countless other devices that now rely on Internet access to work, such as digital video recorders and Internet radios.
Start up AirPort Utility, located in the Utilities folder within your Applications folder.
Click the AirPort device you want to configure and click Continue.
Enter a name and password for your AirPort and click Continue.
Choose I want to create a new wireless network and click Continue.
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Tip: What’s Your Name Again?
Give your network a name you’re sure you can remember—don’t just default to AirPort Network or something else generic. You need to be able to pick your network out of the crowd after all your neighbors get on the Wi-Fi bandwagon too.
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Tip: Speaking of Names
Be sure to give your AirPort itself a name that identifies it clearly. You can add other AirPort devices to your network to extend it, and when you do that, you’ll want to be sure which device is located where.
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Choose a security level and enter a name and password for the new network; then click Continue.
Enter your network’s router address (usually the address of your cable or DSL modem) and click Continue.
Click Update.
Click Continue. After the settings are sent to your AirPort and it restarts, the new network will be available on your Mac.
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Note: Staying Secure
In step 5, where you must choose a security level, don’t be tempted to skip it and leave your network unsecured. True, a secured network requires a password to join, which can be a pain to remember and enter on multiple devices, but you need to shield your bank transactions and other private data from the outside world. Plus, do you really want the yahoos next door using up all your bandwidth downloading illegal movies?
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Connecting to Networked Computers
Networking has always been easy with Macs, but now the system’s networking features are easier to use and more powerful than ever. You can connect to any Mac or Windows computer on your network using either AppleTalk or TCP networking, but all you need to know is the computer’s name or IP address.
In the Finder, choose View, Show Toolbar to display the Places sidebar if it’s not already visible.
Click a computer to connect to in the sidebar’s Shared section.
Click Connect As to log into a user account on the network computer.
Enter your username and password and click Connect.
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Tip: Invisible Friends
If the computer to which you want to connect isn’t visible, you need to find out its network address (available in the Sharing section of System Preferences). Then choose Go, Connect to Server in the Finder and enter the address.
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Tip: Connecting with the Other Side
To connect to a Windows computer, assign it an IP address (refer to Windows documentation). Then choose Go, Connect to Server in the Finder, and enter its address in the dialog box in this form: smb://192.168.0.102.
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Sharing Files on a Network
When computers aren’t networked, sharing files requires the use of sneakernet: physically walking a removable disk or flash drive to another machine. Fortunately, creating a network is easy enough (see “Joining a Wired Network,” earlier in this chapter) that Mac users rarely have to resort to sneakernet. Here’s how to share your files on a real network.
Choose Apple menu, System Preferences.
Click Sharing.
Check the box labeled File Sharing.
To change access privileges for specific users, click a user or group’s name and change the privileges status in the column on the right.
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Tip: When You Get There
To connect to another