Neil Houghton wrote:
Nope, no external routers involved. The two iMacs are connected by an ethernet cable, the old G4 flat-panel has the modem so is connected to the phone-line (as I mentioned we are talking dial-up internet, not broadband). I just set the old iMac to share its internet connection and told the new iMac to connect to the internet via ethernet and it seemed to just find the connection (ie how a Mac should work!)
The old G4 mac is acting as a router and DHCP server the same way an ADSL or Cable modem/router might.
Yes, in my case there is only the mac itself but typing its network address into the "connect to server" panel is how I did successfully connect.
Good to hear it.
Hmmmm... not sure how this works in my case. Presumably the G4 iMac is providing a software routing solution for the internet sharing - possibly this is why its address is different when it is connected and sharing the connection? When connected the address was of the form 144.139.xxx.xxx
That's a Telstra address range, so it was assigned from your Internet service provider.
but when unconnected the address was of the form steve-jobs-computer.local
Odd that it shows a name when not connected, but an address when connected. Perhaps it can't find out the name associated with the address Telstra hands you.
While I get the concept of machines having addresses I don't really understand the distinction between Network address
The network address isn't something you need to worry about usually. Your computer can almost always figure it out from your IP address and subnet mask.
IP Address
The IP address is the primary address you need to worry about. It's used by TCP/IP, AppleTalk/IP, and most other modern p, Ethernet ID rotocols. A DNS name like "something.com" is looked up in a directory to obtain the IP address to connect to when you ask to view something.com .
Subnet Mask
The subnet mask is used to chop a network into smaller groups of computers which are only allowed to talk to each other through a router. Subnets are network administrator voodoo, you just don't need to care so long as your computers's subnet mask matches that of all the other computers on the same part of the network.
Router Address (when it's not another machine)
When you try to talk to a computer that's not on the immediately local network, the router address specifies where it should address the data to if it wants it forwarded along to the real destination. It's sometimes called a default gateway address.
Ethernet Address
The Ethernet address is a unique address used for lower-level communication between computers directly on the local network. TCP/IP and other protocols travel over Ethernet when you're on an Ethernet network. The only time you're ever likely to care about this address is if you're trying to configure a DSL/cable router to hand out fixed addresses to your computers.
IPv6 Address - all of which my machine(s) apparently have!
IPv6 is the "new version" of IP (the lower level part of TCP/IP). It's designed to solve a bunch of problems with the current Internet, but nobody really uses it much even though it's been around for ages, because nobody else uses it much. Chicken and egg. You're extremely unlikely to need to care about IPv6.
-- Craig Ringer
