Mac Question

david29dpo

In the finder sidebar (under shared) i can see my laptop (fine). However i can also sometime see another (not mine) The get info says PC sever. What is it? No one else on my network!

Leopard

What other devices of yours are on your network?

What type of Mac is it and what operating system are you using? OS 10.6 displays things in the sidebar differently to OS 10.5.

Scrilla

Do you have a NAS (hard drive) or a printer attached to your network?

I know Brother printers tend to identify themselves as PC Servers, so you may have a similar device.

david29dpo

Leopard wrote: »

What other devices of yours are on your network?

What type of Mac is it and what operating system are you using? OS 10.6 displays things in the sidebar differently to OS 10.5.

New ish Imac running 10.5.8

david29dpo

Scrilla wrote: »

Do you have a NAS (hard drive) or a printer attached to your network?

I know Brother printers tend to identify themselves as PC Servers, so you may have a similar device.

I have a time machine backup drive & a HP network printer.

Leopard

Is the backup hard drive you use for Time Machine partitioned with any volumes in FAT32, as opposed to HFS+ ?

Mac OS 10.5 used to display my (Ethernet) networked Konika Minolta 5430 DL laser printer in the sidebar, with a "name" that was actually its MAC ID number. Mac OS 10.6 doesn't display it at all.

If you're using Mac OS 10.5.8, what you're seeing in the sidebar is probably your networked HP printer.

Switch everything off, disconnect the printer completely from your network (i.e. unplug its Ethernet lead) re-start and see if the "PC server" has disappeared from the sidebar.

RobertoMoir

david29dpo wrote: »

I have a time machine backup drive

An Apple Time Capsule? Or something else? You presumably also have a cable or ADSL modem/router?

david29dpo wrote: »

& a HP network printer.

If this is configured for Windows printing then it may be the problem.

You can possibly open the terminal and 'ping' the network name that appears in finder.
The IP address returned will hopefully match an address for one of the devices you know about.

david29dpo

Leopard wrote: »

Is the backup hard drive you use for Time Machine partitioned with any volumes in FAT32, as opposed to HFS+ ?

Mac OS 10.5 used to display my (Ethernet) networked Konika Minolta 5430 DL laser printer in the sidebar, with a "name" that was actually its MAC ID number. Mac OS 10.6 doesn't display it at all.

If you're using Mac OS 10.5.8, what you're seeing in the sidebar is probably your networked HP printer.

Switch everything off, disconnect the printer completely from your network (i.e. unplug its Ethernet lead) re-start and see if the "PC server" has disappeared from the sidebar.

Backup is not partitioned. Printer is not on or connected half the time!

RobertoMoir

Leopard wrote: »

Is the backup hard drive you use for Time Machine partitioned with any volumes in FAT32, as opposed to HFS+ ?

I've got to ask - what difference does that make and is it even possible to format a time capsule disk as fat32?

RobertoMoir

Just had a thought. OP, flame may help you trace what is going on

Leopard

RobertoMoir wrote: »

I've got to ask - what difference does that make and is it even possible to format a time capsule disk as fat32?

I don't have (and don't want) an Apple Time Capsule, myself. But, essentially, it is just an Airport Extreme Base Station with a hard drive inside it. I prefer, instead, to have simple Airport Extreme Base stations connected to conventional external hard drives by USB2.

(Although, for reasons of speed, I usually connect external hard drives by Firewire 800 to the old Power Mac G4 tower which we now use as a work-horse server and which is Gigabit networked; it runs 24/7, off an Uninterrupted Power Supply.)

Despite his vagueness, the OP did state that the device on his network is "a Time Machine backup drive". If this were a Time Capsule it would have been far simpler to write that. And it is hardly likely that he would have re-named a Time Capsule to give it the network title "PC Server".

Given what a Time Capsule actually is, you could re-format it with anything you liked; but formatting it in FAT32 would be self defeating if you wanted to use it for Time Machine backups because those would fall foul of the 4 GB file size limit which FAT32 operates.

Nonetheless, a FAT32 formatted drive can be a useful little thing to have somewhere on your network because both Macs and PCs can read it and write to it – which makes it handy for transferring things from a Mac to a PC (or vice-versa) and also for making stuff available to a networked Playstation 3.

If you attach a USB2 hub to an Apple Airport Extreme, you can also plug into it a an external hard drive formatted in FAT32, which it will then network. I put an old (IDE) 80 GB hard drive from a Mac into an enclosure and formatted that in FAT32: all my network can see it when I switch it on, including my companion's work-supplied Dell laptop which runs Windows.