Use one wireless Mac as an internet access point

Jan 05, '04 09:12:00AM

Contributed by: patrickoehlinger

Reading Ben Hammersley's Weblog, I found the following tip for sharing Internet: In answer to the long held question, can a TiBook with one Wifi card act as a repeater and relay access to everyone else in the room without them having to pay, the answer it turns out is yes. How do we do this? Well, first turn off the built-in Apache installation on the OSX machine that is online. Edit httpd.conf to load mod_proxy (there are about 20 or so lines to uncomment). Turn Apache back on. Go to network prefs, and find out your assigned IP address. Write it on a piece of paper, and pass it around the room, telling them to set it as their web proxy. For those non-UNIX Geeks out there, here is a slightly more detailed guide:

  1. "Turn off the built-in Apache installation on the OS X machine" -- you can do so with the System Preferences -> Sharing [Services tab] -> Personal Web Sharing check box -- make sure it's unchecked.

  2. "Edit httpd.conf to load mod_proxy (there are about 20 or so lines to uncomment)" -- to do so, first make a backup of your old httpd.conf file by entering the following command (one line!) in your Terminal.app (in Application -> Utilities):
    sudo mv /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf.bak
    Now edit the file with the following command:
    sudo pico /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf
    Uncomment lines by removing the # sign; the 20 or so lines you want to uncomment are very close to the bottom of the file.

  3. "Turn Apache back on" -- Just like step 1, but check the box this time.
Now just follow the "write down your IP address" step from Ben's instructions, and you're done...

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