I’m in the process of changing ISPs at the moment and have ended up without any broadband for a while. So, at the momet the only internet we now have in the house is my Three 3G dongle. It would be very mean of me not to share its rather slow and poor connection with the rest of the house so I decided to try out OS X’s built-in internet sharing feature for the first time. I have to say I’m impressed. You just choose which connection you want to share via which network connection and away you go. I shared mine over WiFi so I had a little more setup to do but not much. I just had to enter an SSID and a WEP Password.

Although it works well it’s not perfect. For a start only supporting WEP for the encryption is a poor show, you may as well offer no encryption! Even the WEP does not work reliably. From time to time other Macs can’t connect because of “incompatible security settings” and you have to re-start the sharing service. I also had a rather odd issue where I couldn’t share because my AirPort was automatically associating with my wireless base-station and there’s no way I could find of disconnecting so I could enable the sharing. I fixed the problem by turning off my wireless access point since it wasn’t connected to anything useful anyway.

I have a feeling sharing over ethernet would probably be a lot simpler.

[tags]OS X, OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple, Mac, Internet Sharing[/tags]