Hello - yes I am in Windows support and need some help with Macs...

Before at my company we had 2 G4's, (OS9), and attached to them we had 2 external USB HDD's. Both drives were shared so either Mac could see either drive.

Now we have just had installed 2 G5's (OSX), but the engineer that installed them said that with OSX you can't share USB devices (including HDD's and printers) - is this really true, or did he not know exactly what he was doing? (I have my doubts as he wasn't sure what to do with our proxy settings)


PLease help..

I know that you CAN share a USB printer. I do it with my G5 and my G4 PowerBook both are running OS X. I also know that you can share external FireWire hard drives. I have one hooked to each machine and both can be seen by either. I do not know personally about USB hard drives but I would think that they would act the same as firewire hard drives.

If you can see the drive on your finder and it acts like a Volume (mine show as orange volume icons) then I'm sure that they could be accessed by setting up the two G5s in the NETWORK and SHARING preferences panel in system preferences. You will also find printer sharing available in there too.

For the printer sharing, you have to install the printer software on both computers and of course the drivers have to be for OS X- which is sometimes a problem.

I really think your engineer was wrong about what he said about sharing USB drives and printers. With OS X it's really very easy to set up a network! I have an ethernet hard wire network going via a netgear router. Also available is the Airport Wireless networking system.

Good Luck and welcome to our forum!