On May 30, 2006, at 2:26 AM, Nick Batzdorf wrote: > 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. I just bought a 4-port KVM, but am willing to use it to prop open doors if I can control everything through Remote Desktop. How hard was that to implement? > 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. That hard, huh? That sucks. > 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. :) Nick, my ego couldn't possibly be as massive as yours :-), but I agree with you for the same reasons. I'm sure there are many geniuses out there who have great cross-platform networks at home (you and Paul being 2 of them), but I am a sophisticated enough Mac user that this task, which seems almost undoable at this point, should have been as easy as a few mouse clicks. Like I said of Event after they released their excellent but complex EZBus - saying that something is easy does not make it so. I bought a gigabit switch and can finally bring up my laptop HD on my iMac DC, but not the other way around, and my PC doesn't even seem to know that it's on the network. Normally for me, this would all be OT and low priority, but I'm reasonably certain that some of my favorite plugs (namely Sonic Maximizer and Plugsound V.2) will not be making the switch to the MacIntels, and am desperately seeking a way to use my G4 running those plugs in concert with my iMacDC running everything else. Nodes obviously don't help, but MoL might be a solution, among other future products, but any solution is going to require a fast reliable network that doesn't require tweaking every time I try to make music. I'm not there yet. Gregory ----------------------------------------------------------------- LUG Group Buy for Serato's Pitch n' Time LE until May 31st! See http://logic-users.org/groupbuy/serato for full details