A sony laptop (Windows 7, PCLOS, Linux Mint), a Macbook (OSX Snow Leopard, Windows 7), an iMac (OSX, Windows 7), two iPhones and a Blackberry, oh and I almost forgot - an Aspire One netbook running Linpus linux. On our network we also have an Apple Time Capsule, which is a wonderful automated backup server, a router, an N wireless access point, file server, and print server. The Time capsule is plugged into our Netgear router and G wifi access point.
Now, if we had a house full of Macs things would be rediculously easy. To set up a Mac to backup and print you simply need to choose Time Machine from System Preferences and turn it on, if you are wired or wirelessly connected it just sets itself up, just turn it on! Similarly with wired and wireless shared printing, just go to 'Printers' and connect to the printer, the correct drivers are downloaded, installed and kept up to date automatically. Even the current level of ink is displayed when connecting to the printer wirelessly from the Macbook.
This is truely 'zero configuration' which Apple calls 'bonjour'
However, there are lots of other computers in the house running OS's other than OSX. Can they use the Apple server for backup, files, and remote printing?
I can see the Time capsule on the network using the other computers, and was able to browse files but I was never able to set it up to print. I must admit I struggled with Linux for a while until I saw an error message that said something along the lines of 'I can't see the printer, install CUPS server'. Silly me, CUPS stands for 'Common Unix Printing System'. If Linux had no CUPS server, how could it find the printer? I was getting confused about adding a server to a client to connect to the server.
Hint: click 'server/enable CUPS' Using linux mint this was already installed, but not enabled. I simply had to click on printer configuration, and turn on CUPS, doh! Then it just worked just like the Mac. I had to give myself a good slap at this point as I had been messing around typing in complex server strings including port numbers, and I didn't need to do any of that.
Next up was Windows, which again I'd never been able to set up to print. I discovered the problem though, which was due to me wanting the Apple airport software for Windows to work in a specific way. It wouldn't. So the solution was to let the software do what it wanted to, then it worked flawlessly with the printer.
Both the Macs and the Linux machines allow us to remotely print without waking up the server so that it spins up its hard disks, they simply link to network servies and only activate the service needed when it is used. Windows on the other hand has to fully wake up the server in order to mount a drive and mount the printer, the server goes to sleep again after a few minutes , but trying to get Windows to not do this seems impossible.
However, the good news is that I can now watch video from any computer or OS in the house, the iMac and Macbook do wired and wireless hourly backups without the user even noticing using Time machine, Windows, Linux and OSX can all print wirelessly and files can be easily shared between computers. Huzzah!
