Home Networking: The Missing Manual

Sharing Your Mac's Printer

File sharing is great, but Macs can help you save money, too. No longer do you have to buy a separate printer for each computer in your house. Instead, just connect your expensive laser printer to your Mac and then, Mac, Windows, and even Linux computers can easily use the printer. Pretty nifty, eh?

GEM IN THE ROUGH: Copying Privilege Settings Between Folders in OS 9

Privilege settings affect both the current folder you're assigning rights to and all its enclosed folders. In fact, if you look at the Sharing information of a subfolder inside a shared folder, a new option appears called "Use enclosing folder's privileges." When you turn this checkbox on, the subfolder inherits all the privilege settings from its parent folder. If you'd rather each individual folder have its own set of privileges, click the Copy button. This process copies the current folders privileges to all subfolders. If you change a permission at the top level later on, it won't be reflected in any subfolders unless you copy the privileges again.

Printer Sharing in Mac OS X

Like most things in Mac OS X, enabling printer sharing isn't very hard. Open

→ System Preferences → Print & Fax and turn on the "Share my printers with other computers" checkbox. Doing so performs the dual duty of putting a checkbox next to Printer Sharing in the Sharing control panel as well.

That's it. When others connect ...