Wireless iMac --> Server?

[McT]

Apple guy my whole life, but I know nothing about servers/networking etc.

Here's what I got and what I wanna do:

1. Old Graphite iMac --> 150Gb external HD

2. New MacBook

3. Wireless router shared with my 4 college room mates.

I never use the iMac anymore. I want to be able to access my external HD through it so I can dump downloads, backup homework assignments and keep my music library on. I would either appreciate having the HD completely private so the roomates couldn't get to it. Or partitioned so they can maybe have a few GBs for themselves.

Is this remotely (pun intended) possible?

Thanks!

 

[Quartz Extreme]

Apple guy my whole life, but I know nothing about servers/networking etc.

Here's what I got and what I wanna do:

1. Old Graphite iMac --> 150Gb external HD

2. New MacBook

3. Wireless router shared with my 4 college room mates.

I never use the iMac anymore. I want to be able to access my external HD through it so I can dump downloads, backup homework assignments and keep my music library on. I would either appreciate having the HD completely private so the roomates couldn't get to it. Or partitioned so they can maybe have a few GBs for themselves.

Is this remotely (pun intended) possible?

Thanks!

Simple.

Go into System Preferences and turn on Apple File Sharing under the Sharing pane.

Then on your MacBook, under the Go menu select "Connect to Server" then enter in either the IP address (ex: 192.168.0.10) or hostname (ex: My-iMac.local) of the iMac. (The hostname and IP are shown in the Sharing pane.)

Then it will ask for your username and password, and after that will present you with a list of shares that you can mount on your MacBook. (If you want to get fancy with multiple shares and user accounts, SharePoints is a great tool for that)

There you have it. Keep in mind it will be on the slow side over wireless. The transfer is only going to be as fast as the weakest point in the chain. If your iMac is hardwired to the router, and if the router is 802.11g, you'll get 54Mbps at most. If your using an 802.11b Airport card in the iMac, you'll only get 11Mbps at most, which would painfully slow for music. If you're ethernetted to the iMac, you'll get 100Mbps, which is pretty good.

Hope this helps.

 

[McT]

Thanks!

I'm going to set this up when I get home

 

[penter]

thank you so much for the information!!! i've been wanting to figure this out for a while. i didnt even finish reading ur post (no offense), but just by going to "sharing" i can pretty much figure out everything.
thanx again