Networking airport/non-airport computers

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pbzin

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I've got three Macs. Two of them have airport cards (Powerbook and iMac) , the third is an old beige G3 with no airport capability. How can I network the three computers?

What I'm particularly interested in is using the G3 as a print server, since my laser printer is hooked up to it. I want to be able to print wirelessly with the two airport computers. I don't use the G3 for anthing else and emailing files to that computer so I can print them is getting old.

I have an ethernet hub that the Airport and the G3 are plugged into, allowing all three computers to access the same DHCP cable modem. I can't however figure out how to get the computers to talk to each other. I've searched this forum, but so far no luck. Any help is appreciated.
 
do you have a newer airport base station with two ethernet ports? if you do, then this should be quite easy. if you have the older model with only 1 ethernet port, then i m not sure whether its possible.

witth 2: plug the uplink port of your hub into the LAN port of your airport basestation. plug the WAN port of your airport basestation into your cable modem. plug your ethernet computers into the hub, and tell them to get an IP with DHCP over ethernet. tell your airport computers to get an IP with DHCP over airport. make sure that your basestation is handing out DHCP IPs, and you re in business. this is exactly the setup i use, so it definitely works. lemme know if it works out for you.

alternatively, you might use fixed IPs, especially if you want to make one an internal server.
 
So with those older models, i m not sure if it works or not. there do exist routers that route incoming and outgoing traffic through one interface. it is a little bad for your network security to send network traffic out to your ISP, but OK.

So there is one way to see if it works: try it!

heres how it would look. plug the airport, and the computers, and the cable modem into the hub. in this case, i think give the uplink port to the cable modem. not sure on that. then just see if it works. make sure that none of the computers on the WLAN are getting IPs from the ISP, maybe you should set every computer to manual, to make sure that the router gets the ISP IP address. make sure all the computers have a private airport address. the airport usually defaults to 10.0.1.0 network.

give it a try, it might work. every machine on the network sees the traffic from the ISP but only the router will pick it up and echo it back with a local IP address.
 
The simplest way would be to give the Beige a static ip just above the range the of the airports DHCP then setup tcp/ip up on the beige and appletalk. That should do it after turning on Appletalk on the other Airport macs you should be able to see the beige and the printer.


Dave
 
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