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User Guide

Contents


Internet Sharing Using Remote Access (OT/PPP) and Ethernet

These directions assume that you normally connect to an Internet Service Provider using Remote Access 3.x or OT/PPP 1.0 and that you have your IPNR Mac connected to a working Ethernet hub. In Mac OS 8.5 the OT/PPP control panel was renamed "Remote Access".

Open the TCP/IP Control Panel and press Cmd-K to bring up the "Configurations" dialog. Select the PPP configuration you normally use to connect with your ISP and rename it to "IPNetRouter". Then press Duplicate to make a copy. Give this copy a different name like "Ethernet LAN", press "Make Active", and then using the TCP/IP control panel change it to "Connect via: Ethernet", enter the IP address of this machine on your Ethernet LAN (example: 192.168.0.1), enter the subnet mask (example 255.255.255.0), leave the router address empty, leave the name servers as currently configured to work with your ISP, close the control panel and save this configuration. Note: you must have an active link to get this Ethernet configuration to work properly.

It is important to make this new "Connect via: Ethernet" configuration "Active" or the "primary interface" currently selected with the TCP/IP Control Panel. If you leave PPP as the primary TCP/IP setting, Open Transport will make TCP/IP services unavailable and unload the TCP/IP stack when your PPP connection closes causing your system to crash.

When IPNetRouter tries to open a PPP connection, PPP needs to be able to find its configuration settings in the TCP/IP Preferences File. It does this by looking for the currently selected configuration, but we just set the TCP/IP Control Panel to a "Connect via: Ethernet" configuration. To prevent PPP from complaining that it is not currently selected in the TCP/IP Control Panel, IPNetRouter temporarily modifies the TCP/IP Preferences File to make PPP appear as if it is currently selected. Since it is possible to have more than one PPP configuration saved in your Mac's TCP/IP preferences, IPNetRouter uses the configuration named "IPNetRouter", or if no such configuration exists, the first PPP configuration it finds. For this reason you should name the PPP configuration you want to share "IPNetRouter" in the TCP/IP control panel.

Finally, you should make sure that the Ethernet interface does not unload Open Transport when running IPNetRouter. To do this, open the TCP/IP control panel in the Ethernet configuration, select "User" from the Edit menu, select "Advanced in the resulting dialog, click "OK". In the control panel, click the "Options" button and make sure that "load only when needed" checkbox is unchecked. Click OK. Now set the user mode back to "Basic". Close the TCP/IP control panel and save the setting.

Launch the IPNetRouter application. An "Interfaces" window like the one below will appear.

Port Name "Ethernet" is the ethernet interface you configured using the TCP/IP Control Panel.

In the Configure Interface box, select your PPP device using the popup menu and press "Add" button.

This should cause PPP to connect automatically and add an IP interface to your ISP using the PPP device you selected.

If IPNetRouter reports no such device or address, it means Open Transport was unable to configure OT/PPP. Make sure the "Connect via: PPP" configuration you want IPNetRouter to use is named "IPNetRouter" in the "Configurations" dialog of the TCP/IP control panel that appears when you press Cmd-K (so IPNetRouter can find it). Also make sure OT/PPP is configured to connect automatcially when starting TCP/IP applications.

The "Routes" window should now appear as follows.

Notice the address of the Default-Gateway is very close to the address of your PPP interface. This default gateway is a "pseudo-gateway" at the far end of your PPP connection. If there is more than one Default-Gateway, a router address was probably specified in the TCP/IP Control Panel. You must remove this extra Default-Gateway if there is no such actual gateway. Select the corresponding row and press Remove. In general, you should only have one Default-Gateway.

If you have a Ping tool like IPNetMonitor, you can now ping hosts on the Internet as well as hosts on your Ethernet LAN. Congratulations, your Macintosh is now multihoming!

To allow other machines on your Ethernet LAN to use your PPP connection to the Internet, select the PPP interface in the Interfaces window. Notice the values from this row are copied to the Configure Interface box below. In the Configure Interface box, check "IP Masquerading" and then press Add (you must press Add to actually update the record in the Interfaces table). A small mask should appear by this row in the table.

When you enable IP Masquerading, IPNetRouter automatically sets "IP Forwarding: Automatic" in the Gateway Window.

For other machines on your Ethernet LAN to connect to the Internet through the computer running IPNetRouter (your IP Gateway), you must configure these other machines to use your IP Gateway as their router address (example 192.168.0.1) in the corresponding TCP/IP Control Panels. The TCP/IP Control Panel for your First Slave Machine might appear as follows. Note the IP address used ends in a "2". For each LAN client you have on your network should have a unique last number for the IP address field.

To save your IPNetRouter configuration so you can easily restore it later, select Save under the File menu. To restore this configuration, double-click on the resulting configuration document, or include it in your Startup Items folder.

You can now close the Interfaces window, but you must leave the IPNetRouter application running to continue multihoming. If your PPP connection closes, it should reconnect automatically when there is IP traffic for that interface. You can tell it to manually reconnect by clicking on the "Connect" button in the Interfaces window.

Notice the IP address of this interface and corresponding pseudo-gateway will change if your ISP assigns you a new IP address.

Additional Notes:

Some internet software (like your ftp client) needs to send the IP address of your Macintosh to the server. Since your Mac now has more than one IP address (typically one for the local network and one for the remote connection), the software may try to send the wrong one, not aware that it needs to check which address to use. If this happens, you will get an error from the server. This is not a problem with multihoming, but simply a matter of updating these applications to check which IP address to use. IP Masquerading can provide a work around for this problem since the incorrect address in the ftp PORT command will be translated to appear as the correct address when IP Masquerading is enabled.

IP Addressing: I chose the example IP addresses from network 192.168.x.x because this network range is reserved for private Internets (see RFC 1918). In order to route IP datagrams between two networks, each network must normally have its own network number (the most significant part of the IP address logically ANDed with the network mask). If you wish to follow the suggested example, each machine on your ethernet LAN must have a unique address from network 192.168.0.x (192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.2, 192.168.0.3, etc.). The Macintosh running IPNetRouter (192.168.0.1 in this example) becomes the default router or gateway for the other machines on your ethernet LAN.

Enjoy!

- Peter Siche