Hi everybody! Here's another "dumbass, you should have bought an airport base station instead of a linksys router" question. 
I have an iMac G4 and an iBook 600. As some of you know (because you helped me through the initial trauma!) my iBook doesn't get along very well with the router. I had a helluva time getting the router to even recognize it, and eventually got it all to work by configuring it while it was hardwired to the router. Anyway, now for the next episode of drama.
Last night I tried to move some mp3's from the iMac to the iBook. No matter what I did, I could not get the two machines to see each other on the network. File sharing is enabled on both, obviously. In the "Connect to server" box, nothing showed up under AppleTalk or Local Network on either machine. Typing in the local IP of the iMac (while on the iBook) returned an error. So, not wanting to spend the rest of my life using my iDisk as a mediator between these two cranky machines, I went oldschool on them and liked them up with a CAT5 cable. Now here's the funny part - even doing that, neither machine saw the other when it search for servers. But typing in the new IP of the iMac (that it gave me in th Network panel) worked just fine. As an added bonus, when I unplugged the cable, the iMac switched back over to Airport without a hitch, but the iBook went into its old "Router? What router?" routine. It will stay there until I need to surf the web and watch TV at the same time (that will be incentive enough to go through the whole shut-everything-down-and-start-over thing).
Anyway, what the heck is going on here? I've never done any of thsi stuff in OS X, but I've never had trouble getting hardwired Macs to see each other under Appletalk. Why can't my Macs just get along?!
I have an iMac G4 and an iBook 600. As some of you know (because you helped me through the initial trauma!) my iBook doesn't get along very well with the router. I had a helluva time getting the router to even recognize it, and eventually got it all to work by configuring it while it was hardwired to the router. Anyway, now for the next episode of drama.
Last night I tried to move some mp3's from the iMac to the iBook. No matter what I did, I could not get the two machines to see each other on the network. File sharing is enabled on both, obviously. In the "Connect to server" box, nothing showed up under AppleTalk or Local Network on either machine. Typing in the local IP of the iMac (while on the iBook) returned an error. So, not wanting to spend the rest of my life using my iDisk as a mediator between these two cranky machines, I went oldschool on them and liked them up with a CAT5 cable. Now here's the funny part - even doing that, neither machine saw the other when it search for servers. But typing in the new IP of the iMac (that it gave me in th Network panel) worked just fine. As an added bonus, when I unplugged the cable, the iMac switched back over to Airport without a hitch, but the iBook went into its old "Router? What router?" routine. It will stay there until I need to surf the web and watch TV at the same time (that will be incentive enough to go through the whole shut-everything-down-and-start-over thing).
Anyway, what the heck is going on here? I've never done any of thsi stuff in OS X, but I've never had trouble getting hardwired Macs to see each other under Appletalk. Why can't my Macs just get along?!
