Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
If you have another Mac kicking around, it's natural to want to share things, such as documents, Safari book-
marks, iTunes libraries, and downloads, between it and your MacBook Air. The standard way of sharing data
between computers is to create a network, in particular a wireless network, for MacBook Air. However, that re-
quires having a central connection point for the network, which in the wireless world means a wireless access
point. If you don't have such networking hardware handy (for example, you're in a hotel room or on a plane),
you might think that sharing is off the table, but that's not true. You can create a special wireless network that
directly connects the two Macs.
I'm not talking about a standard wireless network that uses an access point (also called an infrastructure wire-
less network). I'm talking about a
computer-to-computer wireless network
(also called an
ad hoc wireless net-
work
) that doesn't use an access point. As long as you have two (or more) Macs with wireless networking cap-
abilities, it's very easy to set this up:
1. Click the Wi-Fi status icon in the menu bar and then click Create Network.
The Create a Computer-
to-Computer Network dialog appears.
2. Type a name for the new network in the Network Name text box.
3. Leave 11 selected in the Channel list.
4. If you want people to type a password to join your network (a good idea), use the Security list to
choose either 40-bit WEP (to use a 5-character password) or 128-bit WEP (which requires a
13-character password).
5. Type the password in the Password and Confirm password text boxes and click Create.
Your Mac
sets up the computer-to-computer network.
To connect to your new network from another Mac, click the Wi-Fi status icon in the menu bar and then click
the name of your network, which appears in the Devices section of the Wi-Fi menu, as shown in Figure 2.2. If
you set up a password for the network, you're prompted to type the password.
