This isn't as much a hint as a "Wow, that's cool!" If you move from one Airport network to another, and your machine joins automatically (because it has been there before, I guess), then a little notification appears in the top menubar beside the Airport signal strength indicator. The indicator "scrolls" sideways, marquee fashion, three times and then disappears. VERY neat.

As it took me a while to get automated server connections to AFS servers, the following might help someone else save some time. Here's how I did it...

Short version
A correct AFP URL file has to be created and put into the login items panel.

Details
The format of an AFP URL is:

afp://[username[;AUTH=authtype][:password]@]
  server_name[:port]/[volumename][/path]

Note: Shown on two rows for a narrower display; enter as one row without any spaces when creating the AFP URL.

An AFP URL can be generated by dragging the above text (adjusted to your needs) from anywhere typing is possible (like TextEdit, Stickies, etc.) to the desktop. The resulting file can be renamed arbitrarily. Future versions of OS X might depend on the suffix ".afploc", though.

Examples
The user vogunaescht wants to access his home directory vogunaescht_home on the volume shared_hd on the server afp.somewhere.net. His password is letmein. The afp url looks like this:

afp://vogunaescht:letmein@afp.somewhere.net
  /shared_hd/vogunaescht_home

[Shown on two rows]

Guest access to the shared volume shared_hd on the server with the IP address 192.168.1.234 looks like this:

afp://;AUTH=No%20User%20Authent@192.168.1.234/shared_hd/

Reference
Networking Developer Documentation: Apple Filing Protocol Client

Jaguar has much improved Windows file sharing support, but one thing that bothered me was that it auto-filled the description to that of "Samba 2.2.3a� when browsing to the Mac from within My Network Places on my Windows box. I wished I could change this to something more descriptive. Well you can!

Open up the terminal and type

sudo pico /etc/smb.conf

Scroll down to the [global] section and add the line

server string = A nice description goes here

then hit control-X then "Y" (to save the file and exit Pico).

Next restart the system and BAM! "Samba 2.2.3a� should be replaced by whatever you put for the server string. You can also change the hostname of the box (and the name that shows up in parentheses in the Windows box) by changing your Rendezvous name in the sharing portion of the control panel.

[Editor's note: I haven't tried this, but you might not need to restart. Try simply disabling and re-enabling the "Windows sharing" in the Sharing prefs panel first. It might do the trick.]

There have been lots of printing hints here lately, but none quite solving the following problem: How to print from a Windows XP machine to an AppleTalk LaserWriter attached to a Mac OS X machine. Here's how to do it:

1. Things you may need to do first:
   In the Sharing Preference Pane, turn on Windows Sharing and Printer Sharing. Configure samba to use cups as explained here on macosxhints. I don't know for sure that all these things are necessary because I haven't tested it without them.
   
   
2. Find out the name CUPS gives your printer.
   It's probably the name you think it is, but substitute the underscore character for a blank space and the letter g for an apostrophe. You can find out for sure by looking in the file /etc/cups/printers.conf (you will need to do this as super user). There should be an entry for your printer; its name occurs after the word Printer at the beginning of the entry.
   
   
3. Find out the IP address or host name of the Mac OS X machine.
   Use the Network preference pane to get this bit of info; I think either of these will do, but I've only tried it with the IP address.
   
   
4. Go to your Windows XP machine and start up the Add Printer Wizard.
   Select "Network printer ..." then "Connect to a printer on the internet ..." and type the following in the space where it asks for the URL:
   http://ip_address:631/printers/name_of_printer
   Substitute the printer name and ip address you found before for "name_of_printer" and "ip_address".

This is mostly gleaned from other hints on macosxhints and from Apple forums, but I haven't seen it all in one place.

I posted this hint over at the Apple forums and thougth it might be useful here...

I finally figured out how to print to my unsupported HP T45 Officejet which is connected to my Windows 2000 server via parallel port. This will probably also work for other HP deskjets and other versions of Windows provided they are hooked up similarly.

You can now enable full duplex ethernet in Jaguar. Previously, the ifconfig command would not recognise the mediaopt full-duplex flag, even though ifconfig listed it as an option. It seems to be fixed now in Jaguar, but I have not yet done any speed tests to confirm whether it really is working. Anyways the error message is gone when you try to enable full-duplex. These commands should be entered in the terminal window:

To view the current ethernet settings:

  % ifconfig

To change to full duplex:

  % sudo ifconfig en0 mediaopt full-duplex

To change back to half duplex:

  % sudo ifconfig en0 mediaopt half-duplex

To force a different speed (your network/hub/router/modem must also support this speed!):

  % sudo ifconfig en0 media 10baseT/UTP mediaopt full-duplex   [or]
  % sudo ifconfig en0 media 100baseTX mediaopt full-duplex     [etc...]

Check the output of 'ifconfig' to see the supported media types for your ethernet card.

Even if your other network hardware supports full-duplex operation (it probably does) you may not notice a big difference in speed unless you have a lot of two-way traffic. If you do have constant simultaneous upstream and downstream traffic you might see a speed increase up to 12% depending on other network conditions.

It's easy to enable OS 9 clients to print to your shared PostScript printers on a Jaguar server; all you need to do is set up cups-lpd on the server. First, add a new file 'printer' to the /etc/xinetd.d directory containing these lines:

service printer
{
  disable       = no
  socket_type   = stream
  protocol      = tcp
  wait          = no
  user          = root
  server        = /usr/libexec/cups/daemon/cups-lpd
  groups        = yes
  flags         = REUSE
}

Then restart xinetd with:

 % sudo killall -HUP xinetd

Obviously, "Printer Sharing" needs to be enabled in the 'Sharing' Prefs panel, and if you have the built-in firewall enabled, add a new rule to pass through port 515 (lpd).

OS 9 clients then have to create a new desktop LPR printer, with 'hostname' set to your Jaguar server and 'queue name' set to the printer's CUPS name as displayed by...

 % lpstat -v

... or the CUPS web interface. Of course, this also works with any other client using LPD instead of IPP, such as older UNIX boxes.

Ok, this is very cool (IMHO). So I am excited, because I have waited for this moment since the first release of OSX. Finally I got everything working to replace my network NetInfo with LDAP. The new Jaguar LDAP support is great. I just replaced my NetInfo network domain with a central LDAP server running OpenLDAP on Gentoo linux.

Additionally, I set up a DHCP server to serve the LDAP URL. With this setup, a Jaguar client will hook up to the network without any further work on the client required. All the network users, groups and shares are available.
This is a very nice out of the box experience. Getting there on the server side was a little harder, but with OSX Server it should be no pain at all.

Read the rest of the article for a short summary of what was done on the server side to get this working...

CUPS printing works fine out of the box for most people, but there are a few exceptions. The biggest problem is that many people can't seem to find networked CUPS print servers. I found, in my case, this was because CUPS was not being told where to look for one.

There is a file in /etc/cups called client.conf which needs to be edited. This is most easily done with pico (a Terminal text editor), but as the file is also owned by root, you need to be an administrator. Open the terminal program and move to the cups directory by typing cd /etc/cups then type sudo pico client.conf to start editing the file. If you want to, you could make a backup first by typing something like sudo client.conf client.backup.conf. The first time you use sudo you will get a warning about being careful and, whenever you use sudo after a long period as a 'normal' user, you need to enter your password.

In pico, find the line starting with #ServerName and on the next line, type ServerName Name_of_print_host (don't use quotes or anything; just type the name of the host). Notice the lack of a # sign at the start of the line. There shouldn't be one - that's important. Press control-x to exit pico and save (say yes, you do want to save the file). That's the change made.

Now, for the changes to take effect, you need to restart the cupsd deamon. If you don't like doing this soft of command line stuff, just restart the machine. If you don't want to restart, the following line will usually do it (it finds the pid of the cupsd deamon and sends it a restart command). This all needs to go on one line so it might be better not to copy and paste. Also notice the single quote marks near the start and right at the end are the ones on (on my Apple keyboard) the left under the ~, not the one under the double quote:

sudo kill -HUP `ps -Uroot | grep -n "cupsd" | awk '{print $2}'`

When you next run Print Center, all the printers from the print host should appear.

After some digging in Jaguar, I've just found the setting to change what workgroup you're found in from Windows clients, as well as the setting for adding a WINS server. It's in the Directory Access application in the Utilities folder; open that up, authenticate yourself, then double-click on SMB in the Services tab. The option to change workgroups or add an WINS server should be before you.

Note that you may have to restart the Windows File Services, log out or possibly even restart in order to change viewing/sharing settings. I did change my sharing workgroup successfully with just a stop/start in the sharing panel. Unfortunately, I don't have a WINS server to test with, so I don't know what's involved in getting the Finder's browser to browse a WINS server, or if it even works for that matter.