Well, ive got this working and I know there are a few of you out there who have been thinking of doing this for a while. My work around isnt ideal but it does work, and I am typing this email from my ibook on my back balcony overlooking the pool. the sun in shining and my wife is working in the yard, gardening. This is the life I tell you!
Ok, forget the base station. Unless you want to buy an isdn router to deliver your isdn connection to your base station via ethernet, you need to use internet sharing/software base station.
My imac is my server, connected to my isdn modem via usb. I have to initiate the connection manually on my imac (unless of course you have idsl, which is permanent isdn and works similarly to adsl).
And thats it! You set internet sharing in jaguar to share via ethernet, and also tick the box to share ethernet via airport. You then click options and make the connection secure by selecting 128k WEP, and entering a username and password that the client will have to use to access the network.
Then, I configured my software firewall to allow connections through port 80 (its norton so all i had to to was click "allow web sharing". All other ports are blocked).
Then, on my ibook, for convenience sake, i configured airport to automatically connect to the network name and password I configured prior on the imac. You also need to establish internet sharing on the client, in the settings.
So now, all i have to do is connect as normal to the isdn connection on my imac, open up the ibook and it automatically connects the the shared connection. Performance is excellent, and there is no degridation connecting directly from 1 card to another without the base station.
I also have enabled printer sharing, and i can simply print from my ibook remotely via the same connection, it even brings up the imacs printer settings on my ibook.
As far as security goes, port 80 is the only port which is open, and its only open via the WEP encrypted airport network. I speculate that range will not be as good as with a base station, but I only need aorund 20 metres tops and this will give me at least 30-40.
Awesome hey? Really easy way to go. If you have idsl or similar, and a router, you could connect directly to a base station instead, and just ocnfigure the base station as a pure ethernet connection, similarly to how you would configure a cable connection (and as opposed to a dsl pppoe), but my method has saved me $200 US on a new base station, and around the same on a router.
Very happy over here. Im just going to take another sip of my beer and alternate between looking at the screen, the sky, the pool and my wife
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