Use Airport Express to share a dial-up connection between two Macs

July, 11 2005 04:16 PM Filed in: How-to
This story starts around five years ago on the day that I was visited by the gods of broadband internet. The year was 1999 and Time Warner's Road Runner service was installed in my home. Three years later I purchased my first Airport Card for my iBook as well as a wireless router. This was the beginning of wireless browsing and I would never go back... or so I thought. Flash forward to February 15, 2004. I'm out in the woods far away from the possibility of affordable broadband and I'm now tethered to a phone cord! A double whammy! Okay, fine, I can adapt. I deal with the slowness of dial-up and the requirement of a phone cord.

This past summer I purchased Apple's Airport Express and it has worked very well for streaming music and wireless printing. This was no cure for my internet problems but at least I had a use for my Airport Extreme card. In the fall Apple released the new G5 iMac and I now had a plan. I wanted an iMac to use for video editing projects and relieve the strain on my nearly full PowerBook drive. It also occurred to me that while I could not have highspeed I could use the iMac to dial up and share the connection to my PowerBook via the Airport Express. There was a problem though: it didn't work!

My mistake? I tried to share the modem connection via Airport. This method does not allow the iMac to share via Airport thru the Airport Express. Instead it requires that I bypass the Airport Express by joining a network created by the iMac. Well, the problem with that method is that neither computer has access to the Airport Express speakers or printer because they are connected together via there own self created peer-to-peer network.

How to do it properly? Connect the iMac to the Airport Express with an ethernet cable! Open the Sharing preference pane and turn on sharing, select Ethernet not Airport. Select the option to share the modem connection. Now the iMac shares the modem connection via ethernet to the Airport Express and then to my PowerBook. Works perfectly. I'm online and both computers continue to have full access to the Airport Express, printer, and speakers!

My only complaint with the Airport Express is the lack of documentation for this basic functionality. I spent hours searching through google and the Apple support forums for the answer.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Internet Sharing, Airport Express
|