Does Parallels allow XP to see Airport as a wireless card

[noahhendrix]

I have a sort of unique situation due to the restraints of my university network. I have spent hours trying to connect my Xbox 360 via Internet Sharing so I can play xbox live while also having internet on my Mac. Several tutorials I have read suggest different things all of which seem to have failed. I am now trying very random things, such as this idea:

Through parallels share bridge the ethernet/airport connections in XP and connect to the airport with Xbox 360. I am not sure it will work but I am at my wits end. So my question is that will parallels allow XP to just see the network adapters without considering that they are just ethernet or whatever? Thanks for any advice.

Also note that routers are banned here, so that option is out. If anyone has any ideas feel free to suggest, I will try anything and post my findings here.

 

[janstett]

A router would be the easiest thing, why are they banned?

In Parallels and VMWare, Windows VMs are unaware of the nature of the host network adapter. That's on purpose, so the VM doesn't care if your host Macintosh is attached by wireless or ethernet. You might be able to tweak that so the VM has direct control over the network adapter but I don't recall seeing a way to do it.

Would they notice something so innocuous as an Airport Express?

I've done this with Linux boxes, you can try to use your Mac as a soft router if you have a wireless card for your 360 and use your wifi network in adhoc mode. So your Mac would get the ethernet on the public network and then your wireless card would host an ad-hoc 802.11 network which the XBox 360 could join (do you have the wifi network?), and then you'd have to bridge the two networks together so traffic on the adhoc network can get sent to the public network. However if memory serves ad-hoc can only have two peers, no more. If you want two ethernet networks you'd have to look into getting a 2nd ethernet port on the Mac (expresscard or USB even, one per "client" you want to add to your network).

I'd imagine there might even be software to turn a Mac into a soft wireless router but I've never come across it. It may be an interesting project for you to tackle if nobody has ever done it.

 

[noahhendrix]

Thank you

The problem is that I can't seem to get the mac internet sharing to work, tried a million different thing. I believe it has to do with the network setup they have very restricted. I wouldn't worry about them *seeing* it but rather the network exposing it, I guess they have the ability to scan ports and detect routers. Thanks for the advice though I appreciate you taking the time.