Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition

Sharing

Mac OS X is an outstanding, upstanding network citizen, flexible enough to share its contents with other Macs, Windows PCs, people dialing in from the road, and so on. On this panel, you’ll find on/off switches for each of these sharing channels.

In this book, many of these features are covered in other chapters. For example, Screen Sharing and File Sharing are in Chapter 14; Printer Sharing and Scanner Sharing are Chapter 9; and Internet Sharing is in Chapter 10.

Here’s a quick rundown on the other items:

• DVD or CD Sharing. This feature was added to accommodate Macs that don’t have built-in CD/DVD drives, like MacBook Airs and some Mac Minis. When you turn on this option, such driveless computers on the network can “see,” and borrow, your Mac’s DVD drive for the purposes of installing new software or running Mac disk-repair software. (Your drive shows up under the Remote Disc heading in the driveless Mac’s Finder Sidebar.)

• Remote Management. Lets someone else control your Mac using Apple Remote Desktop, a popular add-on program for teachers and system administrators.

• Remote Apple Events. Lets technical gurus send commands to Macs across the network.

• Xgrid Sharing. Xgrid is powerful software that lets you divide up a complex computational task—like computer animation or huge scientific calculations—among a whole bunch of Macs on your network, so that they automatically work on the problem when they’re otherwise sitting idle. If you’re intrigued—and if you have pretty decent programming ...