My daughter bought a cheap Windows PC a couple of years back to play the online game Final Fantasy XI. The company recently released a game expansion, but the software is on a DVD and her computer does not have a DVD drive. After trying to share the DVD drive from another PC and failing, we gave up on a pure Windows solution.

So we put the DVD in my Mac laptop's drive, and after it mounted, I opened Terminal and created a Unix link in my public directory to the DVD.

cd ~/Public
ln -s /Volumes/FFXI

Once her PC located the shared drive on my Mac, she could install the software as if the DVD drive was part of her computer.

Here is a hint that may save you some trouble figuring out how to print from your Windows machines to a Mac-connected printer. There have been some really good suggestions on this website, so I tried to put all the info together in one hint (though it's probably still not comprehensive).

I have one desktop PC, one laptop PC, and a Mac mini connected on my home network. My Mac is running the show, and so, my printer is connected via USB to this machine. So my problem was to figure out how to print off the other two PCs to my Canon i960.

The key software you want on your PC to make life good is Bonjour for Windows (it's linked at the bottom right of that page). Get this, and you are gold. When specifing your printer on your Windows machine, do not select your own printer (ie. my Canon i960). Instead, go with Generic Postscript.

Here are some simple steps that I compiled. First install the printer drivers on your PC and Mac. Download and install bonjour on your PC.

On the Mac:

1. Go to System Preferences and open Print & Fax.
2. Check to see if your printer is installed (ie. mine shows i960).
3. Go to the Sharing preferences panel.
4. Check the following: Windows sharing, and Printer sharing.

On the PC:

1. Install Bonjour.
2. Follow the steps for setting up Bonjour.
3. Once you have found your shared printer on the network and it asks you to specify the driver, go with the Generic Postscript.

And, pretty much at that point, I was printing. Hope this works for you.

Soon after installing the OS X 10.4.6 update, some of us discovered that some of our server volumes were suddenly locked. And some of the folders in these volumes were write locked for no apparent reason.

It didn't take someone too long to come up with a solution -- solutions can be found in Macintouch's Reader Reports, and in this thread on Apple's Discussions boards. However, those are all command line solutions.

As an alternative, here's a little AppleScript that I wrote to make it a little easier for the not-so-techie-geek-types to handle:

set theFolder to ""
set theFolder2 to ""
set theFolder to ¬
 (choose folder with prompt "Select a folder to unlock:")
if theFolder is not "" then
  set theFolder2 to POSIX path of theFolder
  say "Unlocking selected folder."
  do shell script ¬
   "sudo chflags -R nouchg '" & theFolder2 ¬
   & "'" with administrator privileges
end if

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]

I recently had to purchase a new printer, and so I took time to choose one to network. I chose an HP Deskjet 5940. The box said it was compatable with both OS X and XP, and the documentation inside claimed it could be shared on any network.

But I could not convince the iBook and the XP machine to share the printer with each other. Apple said it was the router (D-Link); D-Link said it was the printer (HP); and they said it was my AirPort!

After several weeks of research, I discovered that a Mac quirk with OS X and XP is that OS X will not recognize printer names that have special characters in them (like spaces, underscores, dashes, etc.). This little piece of information would have saved me hours and hours on the phone to the various tech support groups.

After many hours, phone calls, and profanities, I am printing wirelessly using a Linksys WPS54G Print Server. I am printing from a Powerbook G4 running Mac OSX 10.4.5 to an Epson Stylus Photo R320. Here's what worked for me:

Ensure your existing wireless network is operational, i.e. router connected/functional, and computer AirPort card turned on. Plug the Print Server power adapter into the wall outlet. Attach power input to Print Server and wait for power led to glow. Attach printer USB cable to printer input and opposing cable end to Print Server USB port. Wait for USB led and Wireless led to glow.

On your computer, open your Web browser and log into your Print Server. For this application (WPS54G), in the address bar type 192.168.0.11. A login window will appear. Leave "Log In Name" blank and in the password field, type the word admin

Once inside the Print Server, you may see your Print Server's name. It probably corresponds with the Print Server model number, in this case WPS54G (write down the name of your print server).

I was fooling around with my old Color Stylewriter 4100 printer and some LocalTalk connectors, and found how to make it print from Tiger using AppleTalk PAP (Printer Access Protocol). Presently this printer is connected to my old PowerBook 170 using LocalTalk cabling. The PB 170 is running the Apple LocalTalk Bridge (2.1), and is also on my Ethernet network. This tip should also work with any of the physical LocalTalk/Ethernet bridges (Farallon, Asante) available used on eBay and elsewhere with an AppleTalk-enabled StyleWriter.

First, with the printer and bridge computer (or device) turned on and booted up, and your Tiger machine connected to the same network (Ethernet) with AppleTalk active on Ethernet (System Preferences -> Network), open Terminal on the Tiger machine and type atlookup. Note the printer entry, and AppleTalk zone. If you have a simple network, the AppleTalk zone will probably be *.

I have two LANS, each with their own OS X Server, that need to talk to each other through a low bandwidth, secure, dedicated connection. There are various ways to do this, but I opted for using a pair of EtherBridges, which are devices that bridge over a dialup modem connection. So, each server has three ethernet cards: one for the Internet (en0), one for the LAN (en1), and one for the bridging connection between the LANs (en2). The problem was how to configure a route such that traffic for the "other" LAN goes through en2. Note that I did not want simply to bridge the two LANs into a single subnetwork. I needed each to be its own distinct subnet, but with traffic routed between them.

After a bunch of research on the problem, I concluded that the OS X GUI configuration package simply doesn't understand about any kind of routing except a single default route. The traditional BSD way to deal with this problem is to insert code into rc.local, but if I added a route command there, it had no effect or a bizarre effect. I experimented with LaunchDaemons and StartupItems, but they also had no effect or the wrong effect.

To make a long story (several days) short, the trick here is that you must use an ifconfig command in the rc.local script, even though at a later point in the process, the GUI-specified interface configuration will be done redundantly. If you do not do this, the route command will fail, because there will be no device configured for the bridging subnet.

I need to mount shares when I am connected to the main wireless connection here at home. So I wrote a quick ruby script that will do this based on your network name, and mount the shares you have listed.

1. Make a file called auto_mount_shares, open in a text editor.
   
   
2. The script is:
   
   

   #!/usr/bin/ruby
   
   # network name to automount on
   mnt_network = "network-name"
   
   # share names to mount
   # mnt_shares["SHARE-NAME"] = "afp://USER:PASSWORD@IP/SHARE_NAME"
   mnt_shares            = Hash.new
   mnt_shares["backups"] = "afp://eric:password@10.1.1.2/backups"
   #mnt_shares["music"]  = "afp://music:music@10.1.1.2/music"
   
   
   network = `system_profiler SPAirPortDataType | grep -e "Current Wireless Network:"`
   network = network.sub(/Current Wireless Network: /, "").strip
   
   mnt_shares.each { |share_name,location|
     `cd /Volumes; mkdir #{share_name}; mount -t afp #{location} #{share_name} >> /dev/null 2>&1`
   }

   
   
3. Move the file to /usr/local/bin (or somewhere of your liking, but I'll assume you've put it in /usr/local/bin).
   
   
4. In Terminal, run:

   chmod u+x /usr/local/bin/auto_mount_shares

Now, to get it to execute upon login, we will add it as a LoginHook. In Terminal, do the following:

sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow \
LoginHook /usr/local/bin/auto_mount_shares

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one...]

When trying to drag a folder to a Novell File Server from the Mac hard drive, a user received the following message:

Sorry, the operation could not be completed because an unexpected error occured (Error Code -51)

After some digging, the folder was failing once it tried to copy a file that had the # symbol in its name. This was replicated using three different users. Removing the # character fixed the problem and allowed the folder to be copied.

I, like many other users, have had the mysterious "Mac OS X wants to use keychain system" dialog box after each reboot, when AirPort tried to access the wireless network for the first time, that refused to accept any known password. There have been some users out there who solved the problem by simply removing the System.keychain from /Library/Keychains/. Some other users suggested creating a new System.keychain with a known password.

I didnĀ“t feel comfortable using one of those solutions, because I had the feeling that there must be (1) a reason that there is a System.keychain, and (2) that it doesn't have a keyword that is known by the user. Digging a bit deeper into the system (BTW, I'm a designer and no programmer), I found out that the initial installation of 10.4 (and every subsequent update) contains a postflight script that will create this particular keychain. So my solution was quickly found.

You need to have admin-rights on the Mac you want to update using this hint. Then just:

1. Make a backup copy of your current System.keychain. In Terminal, type:

   sudo mv /Library/Keychains/System.keychain /Library/Keychains/System.keychain.bak

2. Use the command from the postflight script to let the system create a fresh keychain:

   sudo /usr/sbin/systemkeychain -C

3. Reboot.

Since taking these three simple steps, all I had to do was enter the information for my WPA protected AirPort networks once, and everything was up and running like it should be.