After I got my Intel iMac I was presented with the problem of needing to work on the same sources from two different machines. At first I thought I’d just keep two copies and use some sort of syncing software. That quickly showed itself to be problematic and I aborted that plan. Next I tried turning on “iDisk Syncing” and editing directly off the iDisk. After a day or two iDisk syncing started to complain of conflicts. That didn’t give me a good feeling that my data was healthy. My solution? File sharing over the unused gigE ports on each of the machines.

How do you do this?

• directly connect one ethernet cable between the two macs. It seems all new Apple hardware will support this without the need for a crossover cable. Check this list to see if your mac requires a crossover cable.
• assign an IP to your “Built-in Ethernet” in network preferences (I recommend a completely different subnet than your Airport is using)
• go to Finder and hit cmd+k for “Connect to server…”
• enter in the afp://{THE IP YOU GAVE THE SLAVE}
• authenticate
• choose your mount point
• enjoy

I rarely unmount the drive. I just put the iMac to sleep and try to make sure the PowerBook is connected before I wake it up. If I forget, it’s not a big deal. OS X figures it out and offers to disconnect the mount after a handful of seconds. To reconnect I use the “Recent Items” list from the Apple menu.

Why not IP over FireWire?

When I first started writing this post I was actually using IP over FireWire, which is pretty cool. However, one of the downsides I found using the FW connection was that my iMac couldn’t talk to both my PowerBook and another external drive. When I had my PowerBook plugged in to the iMac via FW the IP over FW seemed to take over the FW bus and using FW for any other device didn’t work. As I was writing that complaint for the original post I realized I had two unused gigE ports and gave that a try. As you may have guessed, it’s been working great. I wasn’t saturating FW’s 400mbps so switching to gigE gives me no performance gains, but it allows both of my Macs to be connected to each other and still talk to FW drives.

Why not target disk mode?

Mac’s target disk mode is pretty snazzy, but I didn’t like the idea of my PowerBook becoming a $2000 external FireWire drive. Plus I still do all my email, news reading, surfing on my PowerBook, I don’t want to sync anymore than I need to.

How do you type on that PowerBook?

I use synergyKM. The best way I can describe synergy is, “VNC without the display”. I tell synergy on my PowerBook to connect to my iMac over the gigE connection and the iMac is setup to share its keyboard and mouse with the PowerBook. I just tell synergy on my iMac that the PowerBook is to the left. Now when I mouse off the left of my iMac I end up on my PowerBook. It’s very handy.

screenshot of my desk brought to you by Comic Life

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 11th, 2006 at 9:00 am and is filed under OS X, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.