Printer sharing in Snow Leopard OS

Printer sharing allows you to share a single printer that is already set up on a computer with other users on your network. This allows the budget-conscious consumer to avoid buying a separate printer for each computer in a home or office environment. This exercise requires that you already have a printer installed on one computer on your network that is running Snow Leopard.

1. From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences, and press the Sharing button.

2. Click the Printer Sharing entry on the left side of the preference pane to highlight it, and then click the check box to enable Printer Sharing. By default, anyone on your network will be able to print to this printer.

Now that Printer Sharing is enabled, you need to ensure that the specific printer you want to share is enabled.

3. In the Printers section of the Printer Sharing preference pane, click the check box next to the printer that you want to share. In this example, the Epson Stylus Photo RX500 is enabled. Be sure to click the check box next to each printer that you want to share on your network.

4. If necessary, you can add and remove users who you want to allow to print to this printer in the Users section of the Printer Sharing preference pane. Leave this at the default setting for this article.

5. Choose System Preferences > Quit System Preferences.

4. If necessary, you can add and remove users who you want to allow to print to this printer in the Users section of the Printer Sharing preference pane. Leave this at the default setting for this article.

5. Choose System Preferences > Quit System Preferences.

Adding the printer to another computer on the network

This part of the article requires you to be on a different computer than the one in which you enabled printer sharing. Although this exercise assumes that you are running Snow Leopard operating system on the computer that is connecting to the shared printer, this is not a requirement.

1. From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences, then click the Print & Fax button in the Hardware section of the System Preferences pane.

2. Click the plus sign (+) in the lower-left corner of the Print & Fax preference pane to add a printer to this computer.

3. In the Add a printer dialog, you see the name of the printer that has been shared, as well as the name of the computer that is sharing the printer and possible other shared printers on your network. Select the printer you shared in the previous exercise and press the Add button. The new printer is added to the list in the Print & Fax preference pane.

Testing the printer

Now that you’ve added the shared printer to another computer, you should test it to make sure you can print to it.

1. Select the printer from the list on the left side of the Print & Fax preference pane and press the Open Print Queue button. A print queue window for the selected printer is displayed.

2. Choose Printer > Print Test Page. A file called testprint.ps is added to the print queue and the test page prints on the shared printer.

If the test page does not print, make sure that your computer is still connected to the network and that the computer that is sharing the printer is on and has not been put to sleep.

3. Close the printer window. Now that you know how to enable printer sharing in Snow Leopard operating system, add the shared printer to other computers on your network so they can also print to the shared printer.

Your Mac as a web server

Believe it or not, every copy of Snow Leopard operating system ships with a very powerful web server built right into the operating system, called Apache. You can find out more about the Apache web server project at www.apache.org. According to a survey done by Netcraft, as of January 2009, Apache was the most widely used web server software in the world.

A web server is simply software that runs on your computer. Its job is to provide web pages to other computers on your immediate network and even potentially the entire Internet. Every web page that you visit on the Internet is being served by one form of web server software or another. This exercise will focus on sharing web pages within your private network. This is useful for providing information within your office environment or even to provide information to members of your family, such as one member’s sports schedule or family photos. The possibilities are endless.

This exercise will walk you through the basics of enabling the web server on your Mac and accessing that web server from other computers on your network. Let’s get your web server up and running.

1. From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences, and click the Sharing button.

2. Click the Web Sharing entry on the left side of the preference pane to highlight it, then click the checkbox to enable Web Sharing.

Once Web Sharing is enabled, your computer’s web server is available to everyone on your local network. In addition, the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) or web address of your computer is listed on the right side of the Web Sharing preference pane. There are two addresses listed: One address is for the computer itself and the other is for your own personal web site. Each user account on a computer gets his or her own personal web page in addition to the main web server for the computer.