iTunes on the wireless network
After a little difficulty, I’ve got it working! The music on the Mac Mini upstairs is coming out of the speakers of our 15 year-old Aiwa stereo in the diningroom downstairs.
My laptop’s got a Belkin TuneCastII FM Transmitter plugged into its headphone jack. The laptop (booted into WindowsXP) is running iTunes, playing a song—right now, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by The Charlie Daniels Band. And the laptop’s connected over our wireless network.
The Linksys WRT54G in the livingroom is running DD-WRT, a replacement firmware giving it a lot more oompf than what comes on the box by default. I specifically put it on to solve the continuous problem of Mac laptops losing their association with it after a few hours or a day.
Anyway, it turns out the only thing preventing the iTunes on my laptop from seeing the shared music off the mini upstairs was that I’d left the “SPI Firewall” enabled. Since I’ve got the wireless already as tight as I can get it (no broadcast, mac filter, wep encrypted and soon wpa), it’s probably not particularly useful since anything connected via an Ethernet cable wouldn’t be protected by it either.
With that firewall disabled, the packets (to whatever port(s)) made it through and can finally play music on my laptop!
Our 9 month-old boy doesn’t seem to like “Let It Roll”, the next song in that album. Let’s see if he likes The Eagles…
