[macintologist]

This is following a similar theme across a lot of networking stuff on Mac OS X. It's hard to do advanced configurations! You have Samba, AFP, FTP, Apache but it's so hard to configure them past the simple on/off switch.

SO in this post I'm talking about internet sharing. I am constantly sharing my Ethernet connection over Airport to my powerbook. The only thing I can configure is the password and that is pretty much it. There MUST be a way to do some more advanced stuff like port forwarding since my main Mac is also acting as a router for my Powerbook. I'd like to be able to do port forwarding, MAC address authentication so that only my Powerbook is allowed onto the wireless since WPA2 is not supported in Internet Sharing.

Surely someone knows a way around Apple's built in limitations?

[ghporter]

Go the easy route and buy an inexpensive wireless router. You can get a decent product for around $50 if you shop, you won't have to do any "advanced configuration" on your Mac, and many/most support WPA2 as well.

[macintologist]

Yea but why not save the 50 dollars if your can theoretically support all the same features since it's running a natd service. I don't see why there isn't a way to configure things like port forwarding

[ghporter]

It sounds like you're interested in using what you have to get something that you want, which is not a bad attitude to have. Except that ICS doesn't support what you want to do, (at least not easily or elegantly) and you wind up working with a several thousand dollar router that is also a slower than normal computer... So you wind up not only not easily getting what you want out of ICS, you also wind up with computer resources going to supporting another computer's connection instead of the things you want to do on the computer you're sharing. That sounds like $50 worth of hassle and pain in the butt to me.

[macintologist]

So after asking some enterprising linux users (thank god the mac is based on *nix) I have discovered the file thatcom.apple.named.conf.proxy is the config file that lets you change which range of ip addresses to distribute your connection on. for example you can change from distributing 192.168.2.* addresses to 192.168.3.* if you so please. I will be hunting around this wondering *nix system to see what else I can find.

[macintologist]

As far as computer resources being used to route to another computer, at most it's only like 1-2% which is NOTHING on an intel imac.

[ghporter]

Glad you could find something to give you the control you need. My personal feelings come from the past, obviously, when using one computer to connect another was a real drain. I also hate having to run a specific computer to allow others to connect-I turn off computers I'm not using, so turning on computer A to allow computer B to connect to the Internet feels wrong.

Thanks for posting your find, and hopefully you'll find some really good stuff in that config file to give you what you want.