Mac Compatibility Tip
Do you have file sharing set up on your Macs? Or, maybe an AirDisk? (USB hard drive connected to your Airport Base Station.)
If you’re using other platforms on the same network (linux or windows, for instance) you may have trouble seeing those shares from your non-Mac machines. The reason for this is they way Apple sets OS X to share those items. Using Rendezvous (formerly known as “Bonjour”, also known as mDNS) Apple places “.local” on the end of their hostnames. Apple’s rationale for this is that those things utilizing Rendezvous (shares, printers, scanners etc) are local to you - on the same small network.
Unfortunately, this clashes with just about everyone else. Windows machines in an Active Directory will see those shares just fine (they also use .local for addressing) but otherwise (Windows machines in a workgroup or Linux machines in general) won’t see this.
There is, however, an easy fix. You need to tell your non-Macs to look for .local addresses. You’ll need to add a search prefix (a.k.a. search domain) to your network settings. Go into your network settings and look for this field. What you want to add in there is “local” (without the quotes).
That should do it!
