Apple does assure customers that any Xserve already sold up until that day will be fully supported, however. So your warranties, AppleCare, etc. will all be taken care of. And for those customers concerned about not being able to use OS X to run their servers, Apple has some “transition options,” which it details in a .PDF released specifically to address the Xserve end-0f-life.

Cupertino offers either the Mac Pro or the Mac mini as viable alternatives for use as servers, when installed with Snow Leopard Server. In the document, Apple describes the advantages of each alternate setup, and even provides comparative performance benchmarks. The Mac Pro, it maintains, is more powerful than the Xserve, though it doesn’t support rack mounting, obviously, and it also draws more power.

The Mac mini, on the other hand, is laughably underpowered compared to the Xserve, though it can be made to work with server racks via third-party hardware brackets. And, it’s much much cheaper, obviously. Apple also points out that mini is in fact currently Apple’s most popular server option.

Xserve’s demise will probably come as a disappointment to a few dedicated enterprise and small business customers, but it’ll free up resources and time that Apple can then devote to its continued consumer market expansion. I certainly won’t miss it. Will you?

UPDATE: Apple now offers a “Server” configuration of its Mac Pro desktop, which includes one 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor, 8GB of RAM, two 1TB hard drives and an ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card with 1GB of dedicated RAM. It also comes with an unlimited-client license of Mac OS X Server.

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The report assures readers that the data center, located in Maiden, a town of about 4,000 residents, is ready to “ramp up production.” The 500,000 square foot facility won’t actually be producing anything, but will instead operate as a server farm. The specific purpose of those servers isn’t yet known. During Apple’s recent conference call, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said only that the data center was on schedule, with an expected completion (and usage) date of late 2010.

Apple’s plans for the facility must indeed be big, since aerial footage (see video below) seems to confirm the recent Digital Daily assertion that Apple was indeed thinking about doubling the size of the center, adding another 500,000 square feet to its already considerable footprint.

The site will be at least five times the size of Apple’s largest current server facility, located in Newark, California. Size alone suggests more than just an evolutionary upgrade in Apple’s server capacity. So why the sudden, massive capacity increase?

Apple TV: Well, most obviously, Apple just announced that it sold 250,000 Apple TVs in that device’s first three months on market. Since the new Apple TV is a streaming only product, offering on demand streams of video, that should translate into a much greater strain on Apple’s servers. But reports seem to indicate that iTunes rental service streaming to Apple TV has been largely without issue to date, which would suggest that capacity isn’t an issue yet. Taken alone, the Apple TV’s streaming demands can’t account for the need for a new data center this big, even if Apple had massively undersold its own expectations for the device, which doesn’t appear to be the case.

MobileMe: Apple also has MobileMe, its own cloud-based services including email, contact, bookmark and note syncing, and virtual cloud storage. The service allows subscribers to keep their information up-to-date and synchronized across multiple Macs and iOS devices. I doubt the MobileMe subscriber base is expanding exponentially, or we would’ve heard about it at the conference call, but there is another possibility: Apple is planning to open up the service to all Apple device owners. If Apple introduced a tiered system, with limited access for free users, it would be a huge incentive for prospective hardware buyers.

iTunes in the Cloud: Finally, there’s the old chestnut of Apple’s plans to bring iTunes to the cloud. A streaming music subscription service has often been rumored, but hasn’t yet materialized. Maybe Apple was simply lacking the infrastructure, and didn’t want to launch a service before quality could be assured.

Whatever the case with music, media streaming and cloud services seem to be written in stone for the future of computing, so Apple’s North Carolina data center, even at one million square feet, makes a lot of sense. And given Oppenheimer’s schedule for facility to become operational, we’ll see what Apple has planned for the site sooner rather than later.

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Recently, I’ve been migrating the functionality of my old Ubuntu Linux server to my wife’s old iMac. Since a big part of the reason to decommission my old Linux PC was to reduce my total power consumption, I wanted to fully utilize Snow Leopard’s Wake On Demand functionality with as many services as possible.

Wake On Demand is a relatively new feature that arrived with Snow Leopard. It allows your Mac to be put into sleep mode and then be woken up on demand when one of its services is required. This feature requires a compatible Apple AirPort Base Station (or Time Capsule) and OS X 10.6 running on the Mac. Most of the standard system services (File Sharing, Screen Sharing, Scanner & Printer Sharing etc.) will work automagically with this setup, but custom services such a my subversion and the built-in web sharing do not. However it’s not hard to make these services compatible with Wake On Demand with only a little bit of work to set it up. Here’s how I did it.

Bonjour

For the Wake On Demand functionality to work properly, any service being hosted by a Mac must be registered with Bonjour, Apple’s zero config service discovery protocol. This is how the Airport Base Station knows when its appropriate to wake up a sleeping Mac. To assist with getting a complete picture, I’d recommend downloading a great free utility called Bonjour Browser. This application will show you all the services currently being broadcast by Bonjour on your network. Any service displayed here will be automatically enabled to use Wake On Demand by your AirPort base station. Most of the server software components such as File Sharing will register with Bonjour itself, however for the ones that don’t, we need to do it on their behalf.

Luckily this is easy, as OS X comes with a command line utility called dns-sd, the DNS Service Discovery tool. This ties directly in with the Bonjour system and with it we can register services with Bonjour. Lets use subversion as our example. Subversion’s TCP port is usually 3690, so assuming you have a standard setup, we can register subversion with Bonjour with:

dns-sd -R "SVN" _svn._tcp. . 3690 pdl=application/svnserve

If we run this command manually in Terminal.app, we can quickly verify that our Bonjour broadcast was successful by using Bonjour Browser. The service will remain registered with Bonjour for as long as the dns-sd command is still running; as soon as we press Control+C to kill the command, we can see in Bonjour Browser that our service disappears.

Of course it’s not terribly useful if we need to manually run a command every time our computer reboots (even if Macs don’t need to be rebooted that often). To make the Bonjour registration occur automatically at system startup we need to launch our command using the launchd subsystem, which OS X uses for automatically starting background services. The easiest way to configure this to run automatically via launchd is by using Lingon. You can grab the latest version from Sourceforge. For more details on using Lingon see this previous article I put together, but for this task we just need to add a new User Daemon.

Run Lingon, click the New button and select User Daemons.

Fill out the dialog as follows:
Name: org.subversion.bonjour
What: dns-sd -R "SVN" _svn._tcp. . 3690 pdl=application/svnserve

Be sure to tick the “Keep it running all the time” and “Run it when it is loaded by the system” checkboxes. Click the save button and restart your Mac. If everything has been done right, you should be able to see this instance of dns-sd in Activity Monitor when viewing All Processes.

Rinse and Repeat

The process described above can also be used for any other service, such as for the Web Sharing service (port 80) or any other custom service that you’ve setup. Simply replace the references to the application protocol (ie. svn) and the applicable port number and create a new launchd item for each one. This isn’t the most ideal solution, as each new instance of dns-sd takes about 380KB of memory, however if you’re running a number of these extra services I would assume that you have at least 2GB of ram and the impact of 380KB is negligible. Each instance of dns-sd also uses a negligible amount of CPU processing time so it won’t get in the way of other processes. Of course the perfect ideal solution would be that the server software you’re running registers itself with Bonjour, but if that was the case you wouldn’t need to be reading this article.

Final Result

With everything set up correctly, you should now be able to replicate the following test:

• Put your Mac to sleep
• From another device on your network access your custom service(s)
• Rejoice with a warm fuzzy feeling as you realize your electricity bill will be lower and your carbon footprint is a smaller than it was yesterday.

I hope this has helped someone else achieve on-demand server bliss, with the peace of mind of minimal power consumption like it has for me. Do you have an even better way of doing it?

Last year I took a look at a number of Subversion clients for OS X, finally settling on Versions as my client of choice for my personal coding needs. At the time, I was running a Linux server on some old generic hardware from the days before I drank the Apple Koolaid. After deciding to upgrade my wife’s 17″ iMac with the new i5 27″ model, I realized I could ditch the old Linux hardware and get some great power savings (and hence reduced electricity bill) in the process. The first task I had was moving my SVN repository over from the Linux machine (Ubuntu 9.10) to the iMac running OS X 10.6…and this is how I did it.

All of the SVN application binaries, including the server, already come pre-installed with OS X 10.6, located in the /usr/bin/ directory, so we just have a few steps to get that running.

1. Create a system user for SVN.
2. Create a new repository to store your code in.
3. Optionally create specific SVN users for submission tracking.
4. Configure the server to run automatically at system startup.

Creating an SVN user

While you could easily run the SVN sever with the root user account, for better system security it’s always best to have a dedicated user to run a specific service such as SVN. This limits any possible vulnerabilities in the SVN software from harming the rest of your system; if an exploit is used to end up with a command line ability, the attacker can only damage files belonging to the SVN user.

1. Open System Preferences and go the Accounts page.
   
2. Add a new standard user named svn with a suitable password.
   

This user will be included in the OS X login screen when you start your computer. Since there is usually no reason for somebody to log onto the desktop with this user, it can be hidden from the login screen. You can do so by opening the Terminal application and running the following command:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow HiddenUsersList -array-add svn

If you ever do want to login as the svn user to the desktop, you can click the new ‘Other’ option that appears in the login screen and manually enter the username. On the other hand, if you don’t want the ‘Other’ option at all you can also disable this by entering the following in a terminal window:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow SHOWOTHERUSERS_MANAGED -bool FALSE

You can also delete all the default directories created under the /Users/svn/ directory if you prefer a neat and tidy file system.

Creating your SVN repository

We now need to create the specific root directory for our repository and create it using the svnadmin command by launching the OS X Terminal application and entering the following commands.

sudo -u svn mkdir /Users/svn/svnroot
sudo -u svn svnadmin create /Users/svn/svnroot

You can now view the /Users/svn/svnroot directory and see that new files have been created to form the base of your new repository.

Creating SVN users (optional)

If you are working on your own code and you know without a doubt that nobody else will be accessing your repository, you can skip this step. However it doesn’t hurt to configure a dedicated user now even if it’s just for your sole use, so that code check-ins are properly attributed. To do this we first need to edit the svnserve.conf file and enable the passwd file for user authentication. An easy way from the terminal to edit a file is by using the nano text editor:

sudo -u svn nano /Users/svn/svnroot/conf/svnserve.conf

Remove the # from line 20 so it looks like this:

  ### Uncomment the line below to use the default password file.
  password-db = passwd

If using nano, press Control+X and save your changes. Next edit the passwd file:

sudo -u svn nano /Users/svn/svnroot/conf/passwd

Then add the desired usernames and passwords, in my case I’m adding the user ‘bed’ for myself:

### This file is an example password file for svnserve.
### Its format is similar to that of svnserve.conf. As shown in the
### example below it contains one section labelled [users].
### The name and password for each user follow, one account per line.
[users]
bed = beds_secret_svn_password

Scheduling the server to start automatically

OS X uses the launchd subsystem for automatically starting background services. The easiest way to configure svnserve to run automatically via launchd is by using Lingon. You can grab the latest version from Sourceforge. For more details on using Lingon see this previous article I put together, but for this task we just need to add a new User Daemon:

1. Run Lingon, click the New button and select User Daemons.
   
2. Fill out the dialog as follows:
   Name: org.subversion.svnserve
   What: /usr/bin/svnserve --inetd --root=/Users/svn/svnroot/

   

We now need to click the “Expert” button at the bottom and add the following text under the <dict> section:

<key>Sockets</key>
<dict>
  <key>Listeners</key>
  <dict>
    <key>SockFamily</key>
    <string>IPv4</string>
    <key>SockServiceName</key>
    <string>svn</string>
    <key>SockType</key>
    <string>stream</string>
  </dict>
</dict>
<key>inetdCompatibility</key>
<dict>
  <key>Wait</key>
  <false/>
</dict>
<key>Umask</key>
<integer>2</integer>
<key>UserName</key>
<string>svn</string>
<key>GroupName</key>
<string>staff</string>

So that it looks like this:

Click the save button again and then reboot your computer to give it a test by connecting to localhost or your IP address with your favorite SVN client, ie: svn://bed@localhost. Your SVN server is now ready to be used! The SVN server will only be launched when you first try and use it, so it won’t be taking up any unnecessary resources.

Migrating an existing repository

If you’re like me, and want to migrate an existing repository from another system you can do so easily by skipping the svnadmin command in step two, and just copy the repository directory from the old system to the new system. I would advise to upgrade your existing repository first to ensure that it is compatible with the version of SVN that comes with OS X (SVN version 1.6.x). Also you’ll want to ensure that the copied file’s owner becomes the new SVN user created in step one.

Looking through Apple’s current lineup of products, there’s one that stands out as the sad little orphan: the Apple TV. Apple itself has gone out of its way to lower expectations for this product, with Steve Jobs calling it a “hobby.”

The problem with the Apple TV is that its feature set just isn’t particularly compelling. Streaming my music to my television? My television is for watching stuff, not listening to stuff. Renting movies? Netflix or my local video store offer a much larger selection with better prices and terms. Buying movies and television shows? TV is free and DVDs are cheaper and more flexible than iTunes movies.

As you can see, the Apple TV has a problem. Behind that slick interface is a product that’s outclassed by competitors like Tivo, Roku and game consoles. So how can Cupertino save Apple TV? How about turning it into the center of your digital media life? Today, the Apple TV acts as a peripheral component of your computer, instead let’s turn the tables and turn your computer into a peripheral component of the Apple TV.

How It Would Work

Here’s how I imagine it would work. Turn on the Apple TV and it would immediate scan your networks, both wired and wireless, for Apple devices. After a simple pairing process, the Apple TV would immediately begin copying every piece of digital media found on any paired Mac to its own hard drive. If you have two or more computers in the house, it would compare your libraries and combine them so that you have a central repository for all of your digital media. You could then choose to synchronize missing items back to individual computers automatically, or copy items manually from the Apple TV to your Mac.

Apple has already taken a step in this direction with iTunes 9, which can tell you if other computers in the house have music you lack, and even synchronize automatically. The problem with a direct computer to computer solution is that with the growth of laptops, the amount of time two computers are in the same place and turned on is much less. With an Apple TV you have what amounts to a single-use computer that always sits in the same place and can handle all of the synchronization needs.

In fact when you think of the Apple TV as a computer, the possibilities become much greater. While you’re away, the Apple TV could download new television episodes and podcasts, which would be automatically synchronized to your laptop when it arrives back home. It could also monitor your iTunes account, so if you purchase a song on your iPhone while out and about, the Apple TV would automatically download that song and share it with computers at home before you even get back. And while we’re at it let’s also download software updates for your Mac and have them available for install when you walk in the door.

Hub for iPhone and iPod

Of course Macs are hardly the only Apple device on which we want our digital media. There’s no reason why an Apple TV couldn’t sync directly with your iPod or iPhone. Mac users have been hoping for wireless sync for a long time, but the slow speed of wireless networks have been a problem. Once again you can take advantage of an always on device. There’s no need to set up sync between your Mac and iPhone, instead the minute you walk into your home your iPod/iPhone would begin synchronizing with the Apple TV. If there’s particularly large content, like television shows or a movie, the synchronization could happen overnight while you sleep. You could wake up in the morning and walk out of the house with all the latest content in your pocket. Oh, and let’s also have the Apple TV download any app updates and install them automatically while you’re at home.

Internet Availability

What else could you do with an always on, always connected computer? How about making all of your media and files available over the Internet anytime you want them? Just connect to your Apple TV and stream all of the media on the device directly to your Mac, iPod or iPhone. Flip a switch in the preferences and the Apple TV could store a copy of your home folder, available anywhere, anytime through a slick online interface. Once again this is something Apple is already doing with Mobile Me and the Airport Extreme, but let’s make it easier and automatic.

With the 40GB Apple TV consigned to the dust bin, most users will have plenty of storage with the 160GB model, but just in case, Apple could finally make use of that USB port on the back and let you plug in any external hard drive to gain more storage. Once connected it would automatically be configured to provide overflow storage without any need for configuration on your part. Again, we want the power of a small computer, which the Apple TV is, without the complexities.

A Simple Software Update

All of this could be done with a software update, so every Apple TV already purchased could receive these features. Of course much of this could also be done with a Mac mini, Chronosync and some hackage, but the value proposition is a $229 set top box that not only puts iTunes content on your TV, but manages all of your digital media across all of your devices. Media servers have been around for a while now, but it’s time for Apple to do it better than anyone else, and cement the Apple TV’s place in the digital living room at the same time.

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If you’ve ever been interested in what goes on behind the scenes of a shiny new MacBook, you may be familiar with iStat Pro and iStat Menus. These two widgets for OS X allow you to monitor system performance and resources — either through Dashboard, or your menu bar.

A fairly new counterpart to these apps is iStat for iPhone, a tool that can remotely monitor your Mac’s performance in real time, or display information about your iPhone itself. Using your phone as a small display for reporting hardware performance of your Mac is not only useful — it looks incredibly cool.

Monitoring iPhone Stats

iStat for iPhone costs $1.99, and doesn’t require any setting up. After downloading and installing, you can immediately open the application to see statistics for iPhone memory, disk space, IP addresses, uptime and load averages:

The information displayed can be customized through the application settings, accessed via the cog icon towards the lower right of the screen. It’s also possible to email your iPhone identifier and MAC address automatically — useful if you need to authorize your phone when testing a new application.

Freeing Memory

iStat claims to be able to free up iPhone memory and speed up your device. I had mixed results with this process, and you need to be prepared to wait for quite a while as the memory clears. It didn’t seem to make any major change to the perceived speed of operation (the iPhone is already very snappy!), but it may be more useful if you regularly run memory-intensive apps.

Monitor Your Mac Remotely

Monitoring your iPhone is great, but if you’d like to use the iPhone to report on your Mac’s performance, you’ll need to install the iStat Server. This is a free download, and only takes a few seconds to set up.

After opening the server for the first time, you’ll be presented with an authorization code that can be used to set up an iPhone:

iStat can use either Bonjour or TCP/IP to connect to iStat Server. Bonjour works great when both devices are on the same wireless network. TCP/IP (either via hostname or IP address) may work in other cases. Providing a connection can be established, the iPhone should now display your Mac as an available iStat server.

Select your Mac, and enter the authorization code to establish a connection. Immediately after doing so, the display should update to show a real-time feed of your Mac’s inner workings.

This screen is showing a number of different things:

• CPU – A graph of CPU usage is displayed, updated every second to illustrate which type of processes are using the most processing power.
• Network – A graph displaying the current up/down activity of your network is updated regularly, and a peak value is held.
• Memory – Full memory stats, including wired, active, inactive, free, page ins/outs and swap size.
• Hard Disks – Free and used space on all internal and connected drives is displayed.
• Temps & Fans – Statistics for all the internal temperature sensors and fan speeds are available.
• Uptime – I’m always fascinated by how long my Mac has been running.

It’s possible to alter how these details are displayed through the app settings, and you can select to see only those that interest you if desired.

Network Tools

The fun doesn’t stop with monitoring, as iStat for iPhone also has a range of built-in network tools for performing ping and traceroute operations. These worked well when tested, and retain the look and feel you’d expect from an iPhone application.

The most recently used hostnames and IP addresses are stored in the app, so you can easily re-perform the same operation again if needed. Here is an example of a traceroute operation in action:

Conclusion

There are a number of things I really like about iStat for iPhone. Firstly is the fantastic design of the app — both on the iPhone, and also in the iStat Server application. It looks like something plucked straight from an episode of “24″. Second is the way in which statistics are updated in real time, allowing you to quickly see if a process is using too much memory.

There are a few areas where it would be great to see features added. I’d welcome the ability to drill down further into the information to, for example, view details of individual applications and processes. If I notice that something is using a great deal of processing power, it would be useful to know what, exactly, is causing the problem.

iStat for iPhone is a great little tool, comes in at a very affordable price ($1.99 at present, normally $2.99), and does actually have a few useful features. Whether you need the ability to perform ping and traceroute operations on the go, or just want to feel like James Bond, it’s worth giving the application a try.

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There are two base models of Xserve available. The lower-priced server at $2,999 comes with a single 2.26 GHz Quad-core processor, 3 GB of RAM, one 160GB 7200-rpm SATA drive, and Mac OS X Server 10.5 Unlimited Client edition. The second model, priced at $3,599, gives you eight cores of processor power with two 2.26 GHz Quad-core “Nehalem” chips. Upgrade options include 2.66 and 2.93 GHz versions of the processor, up to 24 GB of RAM, and up to 3 hard drives with a max capacity of 1 terabyte. You can also optionally add-on a 128 GB SSD that won’t occupy any of your drive bays and will be configured as the Xserve’s boot disk, which is quite the handy (though somewhat expensive) option.

Apple is also hoping to improve their green image with the latest Xserve, which it claims is 89 percent more energy efficient measured by performance per watt compared to the model it replaces. They also tout the PVC-free construction of the Xserve body. And thanks to a new feature that puts processor cores into low-power mode when not in use, the Xserve also boasts a 19 percent reduction in power consumption when idle.

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For those of you who have dabbled with website design and development, you may be interested to know that OS X is bundled by default with the Apache web server. This allows you to easily develop websites on your own computer without the need to invest in a domain name or hosting package. However, the standard Apache system in Leopard is fairly limiting for those wanting to delve deeper into web based development languages such as PHP and database technology.

Fortunately, there is a remarkably simple way to set up a fully featured server on your Mac: MAMP. We previously mentioned MAMP when it was conceived way back in 2005, but this post will explain in a little more detail exactly how simple it is to install, configure and start using your MAMP installation.

The abbreviation MAMP stands for: Macintosh, Apache, MySQL and PHP. These are the four main constituents you need to design and develop a full featured website or application on your Mac.

Downloading MAMP

There are two versions of the server available to download, both of which come bundled in the same 130MB package. MAMP Pro is a configurational program for MAMP, allowing you to set up any number of servers to carry out tests without danger for your live system. It’s aimed primarily at those running a production server on their OS X machine, and at the outset you’ll likely be fine with the free version.

Once installed, it creates a ‘MAMP’ folder in your Applications directory. This contains the entire server along with the directory in which to place your website files (‘htdocs’).

Configuring and Using MAMP

There are three main components installed with MAMP.

• Apache: This is the basic web server, and makes the display of HTML pages possible. You can view your local Apache web pages through the URL http://localhost:8888/.
• MySQL: This is the database server, and comes bundled with a utility for easily adding, editing and removing database tables and records — phpMyAdmin. This is the easiest starting point for getting to grips with MySQL. The default username and password for the database install are both ‘root’.
• PHP: Where HTML is great for displaying content, PHP allows you to process information and connect to the MySQL database to store and retrieve information. MAMP allows you to choose between using PHP4 or PHP5, and the configuration options for both can be found in /Applications/MAMP/conf/.

Starting and stopping all these services can be done through the MAMP application itself, or through the bundled Dashboard widget.

The full list of services bundled with MAMP consists of:

• Apache 2.0.59
• MySQL 5.0.41
• PHP 4.4.8 & 5.2.6
• APC 3.0.14
• eAccelerator 0.9.5.3
• XCache 1.2.0
• phpMyAdmin 2.11.7.1
• Zend Optimizer 3.3.3
• SQLiteManager 1.2.0
• Freetype 2.3.4
• t1lib 5.1.1
• curl 7.18.2
• jpeg 6b
• libpng-1.2.18
• gd 2.0.34
• libxml 2.6.32
• libxslt 1.1.24
• gettext 0.17
• libidn 0.6.14
• iconv 1.11
• mcrypt 2.5.8
• YAZ 3.0.6 & PHP/YAZ 1.0.12

Uninstalling MAMP

If you choose to remove MAMP at any time, uninstallation is as simple as dragging the folder from your Applications folder to the Trash. This makes a huge change from a standard server installation which would historically include a series of complicated uninstall steps. If you are interested in the app on a superficial level it is easy to install it, play around, and remove it with no long-lasting effects on your system.

Going Live

Once you’ve created a world-changing web application on your local machine, you’ll need to search for somewhere to host the site permanently. Unfortunately, even if your ISP offers a fixed IP address, hosting your website ‘at home’ is unadvisable. It’s likely to be considerably slower than a server hosted in a professional data center and can cause some tension between you and your ISP. There are literally thousands of hosting companies offering a professional service, with the one I would recommend personally being Media Temple.

Do you have any experience using MAMP, or are you employing a different tactic to locally test and design websites?

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The servers have Intel Xeon Harpertown processors, can have up to 16 GB of RAM, and 6 TB of storage.

The really crazy thing is that Apple still has not done anything. Psystar even released an update for the 10.5.3 update to Leopard. What is Apple saying by not saying anything about this? It seems that silence is permission.

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In both cases, we needed to access the Internet and having a Mac saved the day. It was extremely simple and quick to share my internet connection on my MacBook Pro using built-in features in Mac OS X.

To share an internet connection over Airport, you will need to be connected to the internet by either a wired ethernet connection or by a cellular card. I used a Verizon V740 card to share the internet connection at the convention and hard-wired ethernet connection at the office when our router went out.

So how do you share your Internet connection using Mac OS X? See the tutorial below, or take a look at the video.

Open the preferences pane and click “Sharing”:

Click on the name “Internet Sharing” which will bring up the internet sharing information to the right of the preference pane:

Choose the type of internet you want to share (I have “Built-in Ethernet” selected to share):

in the “To computers using:” section check the box labeled “Airport”:

If you want to name the network, set encryption or a password, click “Airport Options…”:

Once you have configured the settings, check the box next to “Internet Sharing” on the left and you will be prompted with a warning: “Are you sure you want to turn on Internet sharing?” Click Start.

Now your internet connection should be shared. In place of your normal WiFi signal strength indicator you should see the icon on the right.

Also check out the video:

Internet Connection Sharing

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