I've got two macs in the house at the moment. The music library is sitting in iTunes on the iMac. I had some bad sectors on the iBook, so I had to wipe the disk clean and reinstall everything from scratch. I took that opportunity to purge my iTunes library on the iBook (and rely on the iPod and iMac instead).
I've got iTunes set up to do Rendezvous music sharing, but that doesn't work if iTunes isn't running on the iMac.
The fix? Find an open terminal window, and voilà:
[ziggy@duvel ~]$ ssh orval.local open -a itunes [ziggy@duvel ~]$Mac OS X: The Operating System of Choice for couch-potatoes. :-)