Ok, so a bit of history on the Laserjet situation. The 4M Plus is a large network printer that I purchased back in 1996 or 1997 for a “project” that I had going. It has never, even to this day, ever been pushed in terms of its capabilities. I purchased it as an off-lease at an excellent price.

We had it hooked up as part of the wired network in the apartment and everything was going along swimmingly until I purchased a Linksys WRT54G v.2 in late September of 2004. For some reason, the Linksys would not recognize the Laserjet which was frustrating to say the least. Both my networking expert and others said that it was because of something called BootP and that I probably needed a new printer server to get it working again.

I really wanted to purchase a new network printer to replace it but never managed to put the funds together so we made do by printing to it through various laptops and their parallel ports. After quitting my job, funds became a lot more scarce so a new printer was definitely not in the plans.

After my sister moved in and my networking expert moved out, naturally, I had to hook up my sister’s WinXP box to the network. Through a post on the DealChat website, I found a website that dealt with printing on different operating systems called iFelix. Over there, I found the instructions to set my sister’s machine up as a print server so that I could print from my G4 to the Laserjet through her machine. Thanks to SAMBA, I was able to print to the Laserjet from my desktop for the first time in over a year. Yay!

Now, though, setting a static IP on the Laserjet was a different story altogether. Or was it? The idea now is to set static IPs on all of the machines on the network in order for me to be able to port forward on the router so that my blog can go live. The instructions never said anything about leaving out the printer, just that everything on the network had to have a static IP.
I’m pretty sure that my networking expert said that setting an IP on the printer could be done but, if it could be done, wouldn’t it have been done before? Who cares? No need to dwell on that. I’ve got a static IP to set! So, I headed on over to HP’s support forums. There, after a couple of days of posting and asking for help, I received enough vague instructions to throw up my hands and decide that I should just sit down and try it out for myself. The worst thing that could happen is that I would have to reset everything to factory defaults.

After a couple of tries, it worked! I then rushed about and set static IPs on all of the computers. It was then an incredible feeling for me to be able to print directly from my machine (192.168.1.10) to the Laserjet (192.168.1.104). It was even more incredible than printing through Samba because this is something that was being done over the network and something that others had said couldn’t be done. It was a truly liberating feeling!!!

Part III will deal with getting rid of MAMP and the mysteries of Apple’s Personal Websharing.

People to be thanked this time around?

1. The iFelix website for its printing assistance.
2. The HP support forums!
3. MW, who accused me of not knowing anything about IPs and DHCP…or was that later on? hehe

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Welcome everyone to my first inaugural post. It’s been a long journey to get this far and, I suspect, this is just another milestone. This blog is something that I’m particularly proud of because it’s not one that’s hosted on an ISP’s machine. In fact, this WordPress blog is hosted on my own Apache webserver, courtesy of Apple’s OS X Personal Websharing.

I wanted to set up a weblog for a couple of reasons; first, I wanted something that can serve as a public journal of what’s happening in my life and, second, I wanted something to keep track of the various projects that I’m working on and serve as an inspiration to me to keep moving on with them. A big part of this blog is to serve to as an inspiration to both myself and others to keep moving ahead despite the various odds and I hope that this first post will show that.

Now, I’ve always wanted to host a website off of my own computer but various reasons precluded that such as security, lack of content(!), and potential difficulty. I did become interested in setting up a blog early in January and decided to look into the various solutions for doing so. MacWorld magazine had a good article http://www.macworld.com/2005/10/features/betterblog/index.php on how to start and what sort of tools there were.

To be honest, I’ve never really liked taking the easy way out and I do like to brag about taking on challenges. The article’s claim that WordPress was the most powerful blogging tool available immediately perked my interest in the system and basically clinched it as my choice for blogging. Next up was to find a host and this took quite a while. I’m afraid that I tend to research and research and mull over my decisions. Sometimes, I can make a snap decision but at other times I can really dawdle.

I spent about a week looking up various hosting solutions suggested by various forums such as Webhostingtalk.com. My priorities at that time were that they be able to provide Canadian domain name registration and low pricing since I am currently unemployed. I was in the process of signing up for one firm until I found out that they were charging American prices despite being a Canadian company. Yikes! That changed the financial dynamics to some extent.

So, stop and regroup. I decided to look into hosting the weblog on my own G4 933. Why? Well:

1. It has Apache webserver in the form of Apple’s Personal Websharing.
2. I have the high-speed connection.
3. I can set up the firewalls on my machine for some protection.
4. I’ve always wanted to do something like that.
5. It’s cheaper!
6. And, it’s a challenge!!!

On the last, the saying “Reap the whirlwind” comes to mind.

So, I looked into how to host WordPress on a Mac OS X system. I was particularly interested in MAMP (Mac Apache MySQL and PHP) which promised to place everything I needed to serve up WordPress. I found an excellent tutorial put up by Michael Doig at http://michaeldoig.net/4/installing-mamp-and-wordpress.htm. Everything seemed to work fine except that no one could see the weblog.

I asked for assistance on the WordPress forums and VaamYob http://rane.hasitsown.com/blog/index.php was kind enough to spend a couple of hours on IM to see if he could help out. Alas, it still would not work but he did remind me of a site called Portforward.com that has tutorials on how to open ports on various routers for various applications. We suspected that the problem had to do with ports not being opened/forwarded properly. The solution seemed to be to assign static IPs to all of the machines on the network.

Hoo boy! At this point, I felt that I was getting in a bit over my head because networking is not something that I wanted to fool around with. But, after spending so much time and effort on this I felt that giving up was not an option. I estimate that this would have been about 2 weeks after making my initial decision to set up a blog.

Setting the static IPs was not very difficult at all. What did get me was that I now needed to set up a static IP for my Laserjet 4M Plus printer. This entails a bit of backtracking in the story….cont’d

People To Be Thanked So Far:

1. MW, a close personal friend who was instrumental in helping me to set up this weblog with his patient advice and testing.
2. MacWorld’s Weblog Tools article.
3. Michael Doig and his excellent MAMP tutorial.
4. VaamYob

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