Airport Experts in the Hizouse?

Submitted by Morbus Iff on Wed, 2003-10-15 15:48

Who knows anything about Airport networks? Aaron?

Due to the recommedations of some friends, I did NOT purchase an Airport Base Station, under the impression that I'd be able to do a Computer-to-Computer network. With the newly arrived computer, that's where I spent most of my time, and I ran across a fair bit of difficultly. Lemme tell you the oddness I have working.

The G5 (server) and the G4 (client) both have Airport cards. The Airport's TCP/IP settings have been switched from DHCP to Manually (since there's no DHCP server that the Base Station would normally provide), and the IPs have been set to 192.168.177.10 and .11. Since there's no router, those fields were left blank.

With the above configuration, I can create a Computer-to-Computer network on the server, the client can see it, and can "connect" to that network without a problem. However, when I attempt to mount the server's hard drive (either via the private IP address or via the actual Network name), I get, roughly, 7k every ten seconds. Definitely not something I want to transfer files through. (And this happens vice versa too - the server can mount the client's hard drives, but they're simply unusable.)

Now, I also want to get Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) working - the server connects to the 'net, the client should be able to use that connection. So, to faciliate this, I turn on connection sharing in the server's "Sharing" System Pref. Suddenly, the server's little Airport icon no longer shows the Computer-to-Computer network (merely that ICS is turned on). Running over to the client, I can see a full-fledged Airport network (the one created by turning on the server's ICS). I can mount the hard drives and transfer speeds are 500k/sec., certainly something I can live with.

But, oddly, there's no Internet Sharing happening - the client can't get to the Web whatsoever. This is pretty odd, in my opinion, since hey, the only way I got 500k file transfer speeds between the two computers was to TURN ON ICS in the first place.

Anyone with ideas? This is driving me nuts. My only remote inkling is to change the server's Airport IP to the static IP I get from my Internet connection. This makes a tiny bit of sense (since the server IP of the Airport network would then be routable), but I'm five hours away from trying it out.

Gimme suggestions! Let me move on to more important things!