Connecting a laptop to a desktop

[michpen]

I asked,

I was wondering about keeping my original file on my laptop, and then when at my desk have my iMac access this file via Target Mode - eliminating the necessity of syncing and keeping track of a file that moves back and forth between two computers.

Amber answered,

Target mode is good, and it works just like an external hard drive when you do this, but actually I prefer to just use OS X’s Firewire networking. It is super simple to do. Just plug the two computers together with your Firewire cable, turn on sharing on the laptop, and then from the desktop, connect to it in the Network browser of the Finder. It may not be quite as fast, but doing things this way means you don’t have to shut down and reboot your laptop. It using a separate network to do this, so you don’t have to worry about it conflicting with your Internet connexion or anything.

Amber, I’ve now connected my iMac to my PowerBook with a fire wire cable and the file sharing works great. However, my laptop is ALSO connected to my network via airport WIFI - so how do I know that my sharing is using the firewire cable and NOT the WIFI? This isn’t clear from the network browser. Should I care, won’t a firewire connection be faster and more secure than the WIFI?

Thanks.

Michael

[kewms]

You can test by turning WiFi off. Click the little pie-shaped piece on the upper right of the PowerBook’s menu bar, and select “turn Airport off” or something similar in the menu that appears. And yes, the firewire would be more secure.

(This option is especially useful if you run on batteries often. WiFi is a huge battery drain.)

Katherine

[michpen]

OK, so I’m getting some distinct weirdness:

I connect my laptop (G4 PowerBook, Tiger) to my new iMac (Intel, Leopard). I’ve tried it via both firewire and ethernet. Either way, when I use Scrivener on the iMac to open a file living on the PowerBook, the first thing that happens is that in the multi-column finder window, I double click on the file, and as it is loading the file-icon in the column immediately to the right of the file itself begins to flash repeatedly in a way I’ve never seen before on a Mac.

The file will open in Scrivener. However, every time I go to save the file, even if the change is a single character, I immediately get dumped into the finder window. I can go back to Scrivener and all is fine, the Scri document is saved. But save again, and the same thing happens.

Clearly, this is a network issue, but what could be causing it?

• The Scrivener file is pretty big.
• I only have 1 gig of memory on the iMac
• I suppose I could try accessing the file via the PowerBook’s Drop Box (rather than logging in as a registered account), but can 't imagine this would make a difference.

Any thoughts?

If I can’t get this to work, I’ve thought of getting an external USB hard drive. But my PowerBook would only access it via USB 1 (and the drive itself would only be spinning at 5400 rpm), is that too slow, would I get into the same kind of problem I have above?

Thanks.

[antony]

Don’t know about the rest, but I think the flashing thing is due to the live preview functionality in Leopard - it’s updating the quicklook preview, which shows you all the document titles and synopses, and presumably because you’re working [a] over a network, and [b] reading from a slower machine, the redraw is slow.

The same thing happens to me when I open a large (number of documents, not disk size) file on my G5 iMac, but not when I open the same file on my MacBook - presumably because the MB is so much faster.