There's an AirPort card in my Powerbook. There's a wireless card in a PC laptop. The Mac is connected to the internet via ethernet. Sharing that connection through Airport should be easy right?
Not so. Setting up the Mac side of things seems easy. Just use "sharing" in the system preferences and use the internet tab to set from to "built-in ethernet" and to to "AirPort". Click the AirPort options button and set a network-name and WEP encryption keys.
Press "start" and presto! One shared internet connection.
The PC laptop instantly detects the AirPort network and tries to connect. It will ask for the WEP key and giving that it comes back claiming to have a connection. You'd think this would do it.
Na-ah. Browsing doesn't work. Pinging something doesn't work either.
Trying "ipconfig /all" in a command-box shows that Windows has autoconfigured the IP address of the card to some weird IP address. Note that this is not a DHCP address given out by the Mac, as you would expect. This is self-assigned, as can also be evidenced from the fact that there is no gateway set up. In other words, the "physical layer" is there (the two wireless cards are connected, like an ethernet cable linking two computers) but the network protocol layer (both computers acknowledging eachothers existance and having the ability to send packets across) isn't.
I tried all sort of combinations of settings. Tried disabling encryption. Tried releasing the DHCP lease on the PC side. Tried giving both wireless cards fixed ip addresses on the same network segment and setting the gateway of the PC to be the Mac. Tried slamming the two laptops together to see if they would generate sparks in utter frustration...well almost.
This is pathetic. The problem is compounded further because of the fact that I have no idea what side is to blame. Mac or PC. I even tried switching the whole thing around, i.e. hooking the PC laptop up via ethernet and sharing that connection via wireless. No dice. The PC doesn't even have an option to create a new wireless network! It only seems to be able to join existing networks.
Documentation on both sides is scarce to say the least. The Apple documentation just has a terse description which basically mirrors what I said about setting up connection sharing on the Mac above. Nothing about what kind of settings the computer making use of the shared link should have. On the PC it is even worse. There is no documentation under XP about how to set up these kind of networks. Looking at documentation on how to share between several PC via wireless just shows a stylized picture of a home with several PCs connected via wireless. Even if that picture is what I want to achieve, how the hell do I do it. The answer is found elsewhere: "Connect to a wireless network to get online" (or words to that efect). Gee! How helpful.
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