Mac OS® X Leopard™ All‐in‐One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 2. Using Your Network

In This Chapter

• Finding out what you can do with your network

• Sharing your files and printers with other Macs

• Sharing your files with Windows computers

• Accessing files on Windows computers

• Configuring the built‐in firewall

• Remote‐controlling your Mac from afar

Here's one of those incredibly complex concepts that you always find in these computer books: After you have your network all set up and ready to go, you can do all kinds of things with it. (Now wasn't that utterly painless?) You can use your network to share files, share printers, remotely control your Mac, or even play multi‐user games, like Call of Duty 2 — my favorite — against other friends. To keep your files safe from unwanted snoops, you can configure the Mac OS X built‐in firewall. In this chapter, I cover the basics of file sharing, sharing printers, and using the firewall to protect yourself from intruders.

It's All about (File) Sharing

One of the main reasons for building a network is sharing files between computers. You might even want to set up a server, which is a computer with shared files that are always available to anyone on the network. Think of a server as a common file storage area for the rest of the network. Really, any computer that shares files is technically a server because it's serving, so to speak. But usually most people only use the word server to mean a computer that's dedicated solely to serving files, printers, and so on for the rest of the network.

Creating an account ...