>> What do you have on your G4, just out of interest? From: "Paul Najar" paulnajar@jaminajar.com > Not fully clear what your asking here. I meant what software - what are you serving. > It's a Dual 1GHZ G4 with 1.25 > GB ram, standard 80GB system drive, second internal ATA100 250GB > drive for backups. One one slot is used now for the Gigabit ethernet > card. The slow ethernet port is connected to my cable modem and the > gigabit port to a gigabit switch. Also connected to this switch is my > G5 and an Airport express. With this configuration the G4 is the only > computer to connect to the internet and it delegates ip addresses to > all the other computers on the net and allows them to have internet > access as well. In addition to the G4 & G5 I have a powerbook for > office duties that I'm typing on right now connected to the network > via airport. >> How is having it >> set up as a server an advantage over just using a switcher to connect >> all your machines over gigabit ethernet? > > Because it "serves" internet, fax and printing capabilities to ALL > the computers on the network. It's an advantage because it simplifies > the configuration of the all the other computers and adds > functionality and security. I can fax & print from my powerbook with > no cables at all. For a router to work it needs to have 2 ports - one > for the WAN (or internet in my case) and another for the LAN. I still > have a switch as described above. I see, but I still don't quite follow why it's advantageous having an $800 G4 connect to the internet rather than a router that costs literally 1/20 the price (the router is also a computer, just a much more basic one with a cheap CPU and none of the surrounding stuff, of course). Surely there's more to this than just being able to print from the PowerBook on the wi-fi connection? We happen to have a big article in our current issue about using several PCs on a network, and in this set-up the server has a RAID array from which all the other machines on the network stream samples. You can also use a dedicated machine as a bridge between PCs and Macs, since FX Teleport (www.fx-max.com), which streams audio and MIDI across all the PCs, doesn't work on Mac yet. It all gets pretty involved - although you can (and I do) use some of the ideas rather than the whole thing. In the full set-up described in the article, which is really elegant, the server makes sense - although even then it's not connecting to the internet, a router is. I wrote: >> I really think that networking needs to be made less user-hostile, >> and I'm not talking about Rendezvous, I mean that the system should >> be able to recognize every machine on your local subnet, your router, >> printers, etc.; address them by name; and have them recognized >> automatically without having to do any manual configuration and put >> in manual IP addresses. Routing could be handled that way too. Paul wrote: > All this happens automatically now Nick. Give me an example of what > you mean. And just for the record I am certainly no network guy > myself. I'm just a curious music guy that doesn't mind getting my > hands dirty occasionally. Okay. In my set-up, I have MIDI-Over-LAN (musiclab.com) going from one G5/Logic machine to a slave G5 and three Windows slaves. Since moving to a 30" Cinema display, I've also been controlling the slaves over the network (Remote Desktop) recently - my physical KVM switcher has been sitting on the floor unused. To make that work, each slave machine has to have a fixed IP address; if you just use DHCP, the IP addresses are liable to change every time you turn a machine on and off, and you will go fricking nuts trying to get everything to connect. I also have a color laser printer and another network printer (an all-in-one); they too need fixed addresses, especially the laser printer, since I turn it off when I'm not using it (the noise is unbearable). Plus my daughter's Mac is on the network so she can share a third printer. (There's rhyme and reason to why I have all these printers - I'm only slightly bonkers. :) ) That means you have to go in and assign each machine on the network an IP address manually. Same with the printers - you have to dig through the cryptic menus and assign them numbers. This isn't a huge deal once you understand what's going on, but I only learned how to do this recently. Without wanting to sound overly arrogant, I've been working on Macs literally all day long for the past 20 years and making my living writing about music and recording technology for about 15 of those years. If I only just figured this out, I have a massive enough ego to believe that it's more complicated than it needs to be. :) You can use Rendezvous to locate all the machines, but it's not automatic - especially if you have Macs and Windows and other stuff. It purports to be automatic, but before setting up my network correctly I would have to spent ten minutes figuring out why something wasn't seeing MIDI every time. And I mean every time. That's what I mean when I say it should all be automatic. You should be able to set up networks as easily as you can define your MIDI rig in Audio MIDI Setup. Nick Batzdorf, editor/publisher Virtual Instruments Magazine - the world of softsynths and samplers www.Virtualinstrumentsmag.com 1-877 VImagzn (846-2496) 818/905-9101, cell 590-9101 ----------------------------------------------------------------- LUG Group Buy for Serato's Pitch n' Time LE until May 31st! See http://logic-users.org/groupbuy/serato for full details