Partitioning System discs and using ethernet and wireless simultaneouly

[thedigitalyogi]

Hi All,
my first, brand new, shiny, 24” iMac with a 750Gb drive and the upgraded graphics card arrives tomorrow!

15 years ago I was a Solaris System Administrator, so I’m keen to get under the hood and discover the joys of Mac OS X. That in mind, I have a couple of questions for you:

1: Should I partition the internal hard drive? I was thinking to allocate 15 Gb to the operating system, 30Gb to applications (is there an appropriate mount point, like /opt or /usr/bin in OS X ?) and the rest for home directories.

This may well be “old thinking” so please offer any advice or experiences you may have.

2: My network setup is a little odd! I live next to my girlfriend, and she is receiving her first brand new, shiny 24” iMac tomorrow too! We both have wireless internet. We are both in (mature) student houses, and so I was thinking that if we both connect to the ethernet port of our wireless routers for web access, we could create a separate wireless network to share files, iChat, games etc, thus avoiding being bandwidth hogs and keeping the web a little less cluttered!
Has anyone done this type of thing? How’s it done? Are there routing issues? Can it all be done very easily via the GUI? What applications can be run over a wireless network like this? Does iChat need a server, for example?

and 3: which is very related to 2:
Can I create a login account for myself on my girlfriend’s machine, and set it to mount my home directory (from my machine)over the wireless network onto her computer. And vice versa. In my old Solaris days, we used nfs, /etc/fstab, and latterly the NIS+ service for this kind of thing and it was really good, secure, and easy. Or do we require Leopard server to do this kind of thing?

Lastly, anyone know of any beginners’ guides to MacOSX for Unix people? Although I am a complete newbie when it comes to OS X, the principles on which it is founded are “reasonably” clear to me. Such a guide would be invaluable.

Thanks in advance

James

[Satcomer]

Well bookmark the sites:

1. MacOSXHints and find out some old Unix stuff works with minimal tweaks.

2. MacWindows and they have been doing just cross platform networking since before OS X.

3.VersionTracker and/or MacUpdate - both are one stop Apple program download sites.

4. Accelerate Your Macintosh along with their excellent drive lasso. This site is the one stop for hardware hacking on your Mac.

As far as the sharing it will be a lot easier if both of you are on the IP subnet. Do you understand?

[thedigitalyogi]

no, sorry, I don't understand what you're eluding to - we'll have one IP network for web-based (ethernet) traffic, and another for the private wireless one.

I'm specifically interested in whether apps like iChat can work on what is essentially the LAN rather than the WAN, without iChat server. And also how to configure nfs to mount home directories other this private network, so we can have accounts on both machines which mount our own home directories, if they're available.

[Mikuro]

The partitioning issue is a little complicated. The easiest way is most certainly to use one big ol' partition. If you want to separate applications, it depends on how thorough you want to be. /usr/local is where most third-party command-line apps would likely be installed, and /Applications is the standard place for GUI apps. But it's not that simple. Support files for apps are stored in several places within /Library and ~/Library (mostly the "Application Support" folder, but not exclusively).

Most applications in OS X don't need to be in /Applications, though, or on any volume in particular. You could store them on a separate partition and not worry about mount points at all (the main exceptions are Apple's standard apps; moving them will cause headaches, especially when you run Software Update). Support files do need to be in one of the Libraries, though.

As for the Home folder, if you go into System Preferences > Accounts and control-click on your name in the list, you can get an advanced options window where you can change (among other things) the location of that user's Home folder. So you should be able to direct it to a second partition that way. I've never done this myself, but I haven't heard of any real gotchas involved. You might want to put a symlink into /Users just in case, to accommodate any inflexibly-written programs that assume that's where it'll be.

I suppose you ought to copy the entire folder to the new location before changing the path, too, and then delete the original.



As for iChat, I believe it can work within the LAN. AIM (the AOL Instant Messenger protocol, which iChat uses) might be Internet-only (not sure), but iChat can also use Bonjour to find local users. Select Accounts > Bonjour from the iChat menu and you should see a list of other iChat users on your local network.