Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2003 17:25:55 +0800 From: Charlie Reyes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: USB hub question
I bought a Mac logoed 4 port Belkin USB 1.1 hub (with power supply) at Walmart that lets me hookup a USB printer, scanner, memory card reader to a USB enabled 8500 (A to B cable).
But connecting another USB capable 7600 (A to A cable) into the hub doesn't let it see the other devices and neither the 8500. I thought USB hubs behave like Ethernet hubs.
How can I connect 2 Macs to share the same peripherals and expect normal shutdown without restarting?
USB is not a peer-to-peer networking protocol. You can only have one host (computer) on your USB tree.
This is one reason I find the sudden growth of USB very irritating. It replaced affordable LocalTalk printers (most Mac capable printers came with LocalTalk before USB) and the LocalTalk printers did not cost significantly more than their PC equivalents.
Now days, if you want a networkable printer, you'll pay a $200 premium to get one with ethernet capability and that will probably come as an external print server box which means more boxes, power adapters and messy cabling. For printing, LocalTalk is perfectly adequate. Unless you're sending large postscript jobs, and especially if you're using a Quickdraw printer, LocalTalk is faster than the printer can digest the information anyway.
But all the manufacturers decided, hey, USB is great, we'll dump everything but USB, thus condemning the shared printer market to an expensive realm--unless you want to leave an entire computer turned on to run print-share software.
Bottom line, what you're trying to do isn't going to work that way. If you want to share your peripherals, you either need for them to support a networking protocol, or you need to attach them to a single computer and have software that enables that host computer to share the peripheral over the ethernet or localTalk network.
Jeff Walther
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