Airport and ICS

Submitted by Morbus Iff on Mon, 2003-10-20 11:32

Following up with my original plea for Airport experts, thanks to Aaron Swartz:

  • G5 has an Airport Extreme card built in.
  • G4 has a normal Airport card I bought for this purpose.
  • G5 is the server, G4 is the client.
  • G5 > Network > Airport > "Allow this computer to create networks". G5 > Network > Airport > TCP/IP: "Using DHCP with manual address" (10.0.2.1). I also have the DNS servers of my primary connection (a dialup) entered in here. It seems Airport had some problems with automatically sending the DNS servers (normally assigned by my ISP) to the client machine - specifying them manually helped (before assignation: client could ping IPs but not hosts). AppleTalk has also been turned on, and configures automatically. Finally, "Internet Connection Sharing" is turned on, with a secured 40k WEP network. Turning on ICS creates a software base station, with a DHCP server.
  • The G4 client has been set up with "Using DHCP" (and is auto-assigned an IP of 10.0.2.2). I filled in the DNS information here as well, though I have no clue if that's necessary. The router was auto-assigned to the server's address (10.0.2.1). AppleTalk has been turned on, and is configured automatically. The client is set up NOT to create networks.

I rebooted both boxes after this, connected to the network created by the server's ICS (named "Abhoreal", because I can't stand networking, much less ethereal ones), and things seem to be working fine. The Internet is shared, file sharing is about 500k a second, and I've got what I wanted secondarily: an rsync'd server client for backups. The only minor hassle relates to naming - I can't connect to the machines using their network names (Splooge, MouthWash, and MoistTowelette), but only by their IPs.