LAN network help?

Re: LAN network help?

Yes, crossover cable would be the cheapest. Some of the new macs actually don't need a crossover, as they can figure out on their own whether one is necessary.

Probably the easiest thing to do would be to turn on internet connection sharing on the pc, as it will then configure the mac as long as it has dhcp enabled.

otherwise...
There are ranges of IP addresses reserved for private networks (ie, yours). Set up the following IP addresses manually:

Computer 1:
IP address 192.168.1.10
subnet mask 255.255.255.0
default gateway 192.168.1.10 (or leave blank)

computer 2:
ip address 192.168.1.11
subnet mask 255.255.255.0
default gateway 192.168.1.11 (or leave blank)

Any address from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.254 are valid. Usually the .1 address is reserved for your router/default gateway. the .255 address is your broadcast address, so you want to avoid that. .0 is your base address, and is also not used.

Before you do that, You might just want to try to connect them together and see if it works. Both macs and PCs use the auto-ip subnet if they can't find a dhcp server to get an address. It might work just by connecting them, try that first.

Good luck

 

do you want to...

do you want to share an internet conenction? Do you have a high speed connection? If thats what you want then you will need a router. If you just want to hook them up to play some games then you just need a network hub and regular network cat 5 cables. A cross over cable will work if you only need to talk to 2 computers. Hubs are pretty cheep now.

-evildead