Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

Apple includes a second utility for dealing with remote hard drives. AirPort Disk Utility,
shown in Figure 20-9, is not for setting up shared hard drives, but for managing how your computer
deals with them.
Figure 20-9. Managing shared hard drives with AirPort Disk Utility
AirPort Disk Utility has two simple options. You can elect to automatically discover AirPort
Disks, instead of having to connect to them manually. You can also elect to show a menu bar
item that gives you a list of available AirPort Disks in the area.
AirPort Disk Utility also has a list of all known AirPort Disks, which base station they are
on, and whether you want to mount them when they are in range, or ignore them.
Port Forwarding
CHAPTER 20 LEOPARD NETWORKING 361
A typical home or small office network will have a single machine, usually a router, connected to
the Internet by a public IP address. That machine, in turn, will share its Internet connection with
other machines on the network. Rather than having public IP addresses, the machines on the
local network use local addresses. Aside from saving the significant expense of having multiple
IP addresses, this gives the network added security, since machines without reachable addresses
are essentially invisible to anyone outside the network.
Normally this is a good thing, but not always (for example, if you decide to use your computer
to serve web pages, which is the topic of Chapter 22). Invisibility is not a good trait for a
public web server. In order to receive requests and send out pages, your web server must be
reachable by the outside world. The best way to deal with this problem is to set the router to forward
any incoming packets on a certain port to the web server, which can then fulfill the requests
and send out the necessary data. This process is known as port forwarding.
Of course, the router can’t forward packets if it doesn’t know where to find the server, so the first
step is to give your machine a static IP address. You can either use a hybrid method such as
DHCP with a manual address, or you can just set the entire address manually.
To set up a static IP address, open the Networking panel of System Preferences. Select the
network interface your machine will use to connect to the Internet. Since servers need to stay in
one place in order to effectively serve, this will probably be a desktop machine connected by
Ethernet.