[ale] Macs say the damndest things

[drifter at oppositelock.org (Sean)]

May have finally solved the wifi problems on my wife's Mac laptop.

For the record it is a Macbook 2.1 with 2 gigs of RAM. 
The Airport card had gone all flaky, but several kind folks here on 
Ale suggested an OS reload/update might solve the problem.  

Had that done by the kind (if not totally competent) IT folks at Emory,
who, for a price, installed the latest iteration of OS X.

Then began the struggle to get routine Stuff up and running again.
First hurdle was the network printer. (I was doing all the preliminary work
with the box hard wired into the LAN.)  In the process of trying to
reinstall the printer, I was presented with a message box that 
said, "Please enter the name and password of a user in the lpadmin group."

WTF?

Unfortunately, I do not have the root password for this box and 
"sudo <command>" will not work without the root password either, thanks
to those oh, so competent folks at Emory's IT dept.

But with a little scrounging around I discovered that the file /etc/group 
contains a list of all the groups on the box.  

There aint no "lpadmin" group!

Fortunately it turned out that all this software jostling apparently made
some bits and pieces of software wake up and find the pre-existing 
configuration file for the networked printer. So that now works

And I was able to get the Airport card configured to latch onto the 
in-house wireless LAN; for the first time in months that seems stable.

All in all an "interesting" weekend, albeit one that required Scotch rather
than beer. :)

Sean