Homemade iServe

Alex asks When can we expect an Apple iServe?

Assum­ing you have a spare OS AirPort-​equipped Mac run­ning OS 10.2 lying around, you can expect one this after­noon. It won’t quite pro­vide all the bells and whis­tles Alex has on his wish­list, and it’s not exactly plug-​and-​play, but if you take the fol­low­ing steps you can get a nice little ‘digital hub’ thingy run­ning in next to no time, and you don’t need to be a geek to do it (I’m not and I man­aged). This may not be the very best way of doing things, and it may not work per­fectly for you, but it’s what I have set up at home and it does the job.

All the infor­ma­tion that fol­lows is only a few Googles away but I’ve not seen it in one place before, so it may be useful to some­one. Namely me, when my elderly iBook has one of it’s peri­odic hissy fits and I have to set every­thing up again.

If you spot any errors or know of other tips I’ve missed, do leave a comment.

What you need:

1. Two Airport-​equipped Apple Mac­in­tosh com­put­ers run­ning OS 10.2.x
2. An inter­net connection

First, you need to get the two com­put­ers shar­ing your inter­net con­nec­tion over Air­Port. The com­puter which will act as your server and backup machine will hence­forth be known as One, the com­puter you use for every­thing else will hence­forth be known as Two. You can, obvi­ously, call them any­thing you like by set­ting the Com­puter Name of each in the Shar­ing pane of System Pref­er­ences. I assume you have an inter­net con­nec­tion up and run­ning on One, and that Air­Port is turned on on both computers.

1. Open System Pref­er­ences on One, and click on Sharing
2. Under the Inter­net pane, click the Start button to switch on Inter­net Shar­ing and tick the box to Share your Inter­net con­nec­tion with AirPort-​equipped computers
3. The little Air­Port signal strength indi­ca­tor in the Menu Bar should now show an arrow(If you don’t see a little signal strength indi­ca­tor, open Inter­net Con­nect and tick the box marked Show Air­port status in menu bar)
4. On Two, open Inter­net Con­nect and choose Air­Port from the Con­fig­u­ra­tion drop-​down menu
5. Click the Turn On Air­Port button
6. You should now be able to con­nect to the inter­net wire­lessly from Two. Cool, isn’t it?

Now, you’ll be want­ing to move files between the two com­put­ers. So take the fol­low­ing steps on both One and Two

1. Open System Pref­er­ences, and click on Sharing
2. Under the Ser­vices pane, tick the box to start Per­sonal File Sharing
3. In the Finder, choose Con­nect to Server from the Go menu (or hit Mac + K)
4. A dia­logue box will appear: choose the Server you wish to con­nect to - On One, this will be Two, and vice versa - and then click Connect
5. A login window will now pop up, so log your­self right in. (I’m assum­ing you have an account on both of your com­put­ers. Set­ting up accounts is, as they say, beyond the scope of this document)
6. Another dia­logue box will pop up, asking you which volume you wish to mount. Choose either your Home direc­tory or the Com­puter - depend­ing on how you organ­ise your files, the latter is likely to be of more use
7. Have a look at your Desk­tops. Each com­puter should have it’s oppo­site number mounted as a volume, just like an exter­nal hard drive or your iPod

Now you have your two com­put­ers talk­ing to each other, and shar­ing an inter­net con­nec­tion. Not ter­ri­bly excit­ing. It would be cool if you could plug One into your stereo and listen to all the MP3s on both com­put­ers, wouldn’t it? Ren­dezvous makes this a doddle. Take the fol­low­ing steps on both One and Two.

1. Open iTunes, then open iTunes Preferences
2. Open the Shar­ing pane and tick the boxes marked Look for shared music and Share my music. Enter a Shared Name, ‘One’ or ‘Two’ for exam­ple. There are fur­ther options, which you can set accord­ing to preference
3. All your music stored on Two is now avail­able on One, and vice versa: look in the Playlist sec­tion of iTunes and you should see a new Playlist named accord­ing to the Shared Name you set in Step 2

Back­ing up files is quite impor­tant. Not as impor­tant as lis­ten­ing to MP3s, but impor­tant nonethe­less. Here’s how to make sure all your impor­tant files are backed up from Two, where you do all your work, to One, where they will be safe and sound. You’ll need a .Mac mem­ber­ship for this, as it requires a copy of Backup 2 Public Beta, although I imag­ine you can use most other backup util­i­ties to the same effect - before Backup 2 was released I just used the direc­tory mir­ror­ing and sched­ul­ing func­tions in Trans­mit, an FTP client.

1. If you haven’t already, down­load and install Backup 2 Public Beta on Two
2. Open it, and choose Back up to Drive from the drop-​down menu.
3. Click Set, and choose a loca­tion in the result­ing dia­logue pop-​up to store your backup file on One
4. Choose what you want to back up, either using the Quick­Picks fea­ture, or by drag­ging fold­ers onto the Backup window
5. Click Backup Now
6. You could repeat steps 2-5 every so often, but you might as well sched­ule a reg­u­lar back up: click on the button with a little cal­en­dar icon at the bottom of the Backup window, and choose an appro­pri­ate time and frequency

Now that you have what the pro­fes­sion­als call a Back-​up Strat­egy, you’ll be want­ing some files to back up. I find the var­i­ous peer to peer appli­ca­tions useful for obtain­ing such files (public domain stuff only, of course) but most of these apps are right clunk­ers, hog­ging proces­sor power and memory usage. Since you have two com­put­ers, One might as well take the strain while you’re hard at work on Two, so at this point it’s prob­a­bly worth installing VNC Server on One and VNC Viewer on Two. In tandem, these appli­ca­tions let you con­trol One from Two, so that you can launch any appli­ca­tions you’d rather not have slow­ing down Two. It’s not the best option out there (that would be Apple Remote Desk­top) but it’s free. You could also log in to One remotely using SSH, but if you know how to do that, you don’t need me to tell you how to set up a basic net­work between two Macs, and stopped read­ing after the first paragraph.

So far, so handy. For extra silli­ness (sorry, func­tion­al­ity) you might want to invest in the fol­low­ing optional extras:

1. A Belkin TuneCast or Grif­fin iTrip (both ille­gal in the UK, but widely avail­able on eBay)
2. A Sony Eric­s­son mobile tele­phone or Palm Tung­sten PDA, and the Salling Clicker application.

The TuneCast is a fab­u­lous wee device that broad­casts an FM signal when con­nected to the head­phone jack on com­puter (or iPod, or Walk­man, or what­ever you might have with a head­phone jack). I have mine plugged in to One, with my receiver tuned to the appro­pri­ate fre­quency, so that I can listen to both my MP3s and streamed con­tent from the web on my stereo, and all the other radios in the house.

The Salling Clicker soft­ware is sim­i­larly fab­u­lous, allow­ing you to remotely con­trol a whole host of func­tions on your Mac from your mobile tele­phone. I use it to con­trol iTunes.

So, there you have it.

Next on my list of essen­tially point­less net­worked doo­dads is a PVR (ie a home­made Tivo) which I’m plan­ning to make using a cheapo PC either run­ning Win­dows and Snap­stream Per­sonal Video Sta­tion 3, or (with a lot of help from geekier friends) run­ning Linux and MythTV. I’ll be sure to bore you with the details if and when I get around to it.

Posted at 5pm on 18/09/03 by Jack Mottram to the mac, radio category.
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