So, after a blessedly quick and uneventful drive up to San Francisco (the Prius nav system makes driving around here much more bearable), I wind up with two computers I wish to connect to the ‘net from the hotel room. Surprisingly, I am unable to find an open hotspot to, um, borrow some access from, since SF is alleged to be so free-Wifi dense.
This means resorting to the ever popular 12.95/day wired connection in the hotel room. OK, I figure, we’ll just wire in the work laptop and then share the connection via a wireless card (yeah it’s an old laptop) to the MacBook Pro. The wired connection works great, and is surprisingly snappy. The bad news is after a cumulative hour or so of fiddling with various ICS settings, no dice. It seems the wireless card is not happy to just make it’s on little ad-hoc network (or simulate an AP) and start serving up DHCP address. It’s not just one card mind you, I actually carry around 3 different ones with me for, um, historical reasons I will not go into.
So hmm, let’s see if this can work the other way around, even though wiring the Mac to the desk makes it so much more impractical to play WoW from the bed while watching Sportscenter. So I plug it in, tell the hotel service, that “Yes, I did already sign up for this, didn’t you notice it’s coming from the same port you already know about”, and go into “Sharing” in System Prefs. Aside from a bit of weirdness in the UI (I had to select the wired port in the share from list before Airport showed up in the share to list), a few clicks later it’s happily serving up IP addresses, and my work laptop grabs one. Yay, chalk another one up for MacOS.
PS OK, well apparently the MBP is having a hard time NATing the VPN connection to work, so maybe we’ll just chalk half of one up for it.
PPS Yes, it’s a bit unfair to compare a 3 year old laptop running a 6 year old OS to a practically brand new one, but since when is life fair
PPPS Finally got things to work using the Windows laptop as the “router”, but it involves having to turn off BlackICE (duh), which I’m not too comfortable doing.