Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

iCloud

Apple’s free iCloud service—formerly MobileMe, formerly .Mac, formerly iTools—offers a long list of very useful features. You don’t have to sign up, but you owe it to yourself to know what’s available.

What iCloud Giveth

So what is iCloud? Mainly, it’s these things:

POWER USERS’ CLINIC: Internet Sharing as a Bridge

Ordinarily, only one Mac has Internet Sharing turned on: the one that’s connected directly to the Internet.

But sometimes, you might want another Mac “downstream” to have it on, too. That’s when you want to bridge two networks.

Consider the setup shown here. There are really two networks: one that uses WiFi, and another connected to an Ethernet hub.

If you play your cards right, all these Macs can get online simultaneously, using a single Internet connection.

Set up the gateway Mac so that it’s a WiFi base station, exactly as described on these pages.

Start setting up the bridge Mac the way you’d set up the other WiFi Macs—with Wi-Fi selected as the primary connection method, and Using DHCP turned on in the Network panel.

Then visit the bridge Mac’s Sharing panel. Turn on Internet Sharing here, too, but this time select “To computers using: Built-in Ethernet.”

The bridge Mac is now on both networks. It uses the WiFi connection as a bridge to the gateway Mac and the Internet—and its Ethernet connection to share that happiness with the wired Macs in its own neighborhood.

• A synchronizing ...