iHome – a long way to go

Our situation at home is not that atypical : 2 adults and 2 children, each having their own (Mac) computer but living in a relatively old house (end ‘50ties) with all electricity recently redone but without any ethernet-cables. Fortunately for Macintosh users there is for years the wireless Airport network and that is how we can connect to the net all at the same time : a first generation Airport basestation (graphite) connected via a router to the cablemodem together with Airport cards in most computers. But surely we should be able to get more out of this network than that, (or can’t we?) and that will be one of my main projects this year, to see just how far one can stretch it with minimal investments and using OS 10.3 (Panther) and open source software.

Surely, a major reason for our poor use of possibilities is ignorance. Up till recently this was the way one would go about to get a file printed (we only have one USB-printer connected to the eMac in the living room) : take a Sony-memory stick (called the lipstick here) and get the file on it, go to the living room, start-up the eMac, tansfer the file via the stick to your homedirectory and print it… Only recently I found the obvious bypass to select ‘printer-sharing’ (in System Preferences/Sharing) on the eMac so that one can print directly from any computer provided the eMac and the printer are both turned on.
Can one do better? Yes, one can provided one is willing to buy a new Airport Extreme basestation which has a USB-port. Connecting the USB-printer directly to the basestation, the printer becomes a network-printer of sorts. As the eMac and a recent G4iBook needed already an Airport extreme-card I bought a new station hoping to recycle the old graphite-basestation as a wireless bridge which can be used to extend the range of the basestation (again in the living room) so that the full garden gets covered (which may come in handy this summer) and Apple-documentation certainly gave the impression that this might be possible. However, Airport-extreme stations (third generation) and graphite Airport stations (first generation) seem not to be that compatible. In fact, it is impossible to connect them either wireless (which should be the only choice given our house) or via roaming. So whereas I upgraded the network substantially (at least in principle for as long as there are still (normal)Airport-card computers using it one cannot make use of the increased dataspeed nor of the increased security) at the cost of a perfectly working basestation for which I have no immediate use (maybe I found a way out but I’ll check it out first).

So, there is a lot of work to be done this year and much to my surprise there doesnt seem to be a good book about this type of problem (so what do other people do with their networks ???) so maybe there is a point in blogging my (slow) progress here.