Need help connecting LG Smart TV to Mac Pro using Ethernet

[lhawkins]

My Mac Pro is connected to a WiFi network and internet access works normally. I've turned on Internet sharing from WiFi to Ethernet 2 and have connected an Ethernet cable from Ethernet 2 on the Mac Pro to the LAN connection on the LG Smart TV.

The TV would not automatically find the connection and the Mac Pro shows a 169 IP address. Since this is auto-assigned I assumed that this was the issue. I changed the IP address on the Mac to a manual setting of 10.1.1.1 subnet 255.255.255.0 and then, on the TV I set the IP manually to 10.1.1.2 subnet 255.255.255.0 and the gateway to 10.1.1.1. This allowed the TV to pass the first stage of the connection but then it now fails on the DNS portion. I tried putting in a DNS of 10.1.1.1 (assuming that the Mac would be acting as a gateway and provide DNS services to the TV) which failed. I then tried 192.168.1.1 which is the IP of my wireless router that the Mac Pro is connected to. That failed to so I tried 8.8.8.8 (Google DNS) and that failed as well. It seems that the TV is connecting to my Mac Pro, however it can't seem to find a valid DNS server and that prevents the network setup from finishing.

I don't really need internet on the TV as I only wanted to be able to play content from a locally attached hard drive using Plex's DLNA server, however it would be nice to also have Netflix access and other things in the future.

Has anyone here set up something similar in the past? Anything obvious I'm overlooking?

I do realize that the simplest solution would be to run a physical cable from the router to the TV, however that would involve crawling under the house again and so if it can be avoided, I'd like to avoid it and I thought that the "Internet Connection Sharing" feature would make something like this really easy.

Attached are screenshots of the settings on both the TV and computer.

Any help will be appreciated… Thanks!

 

[justperry]

I had the same problem with mine, was sharing my 3G connection from my Powerbook to the LG, doesn't work.
Connected the TV to my router and moved the 3G Dongle to the router and it's all set.

 

[aarond12]

First, I'm assuming the LG TV doesn't have WiFi. If that's the case, buying an inexpensive WiFi router and configuring it as a client works nicely as a WiFi-to-Ethernet bridge. I keep an old 802.11g router around configured that way just so I have a mobile Ethernet port for working on other people's computers.

Second, configure your Mac's IP address to connect to WiFi first. Once that is working, THEN enable Internet Connection Sharing and attach your TV via Ethernet. Do NOT worry about assigning an IP address for your Mac's Ethernet. Leave it as DHCP. Leave the TV on DHCP as well. You will have two different subnets with your Mac working as the bridge between the two networks.

If this is still not working, make sure your TV isn't having Ethernet handshaking issues with your Mac. Try dropping its Ethernet speed down to 100-base-T full duplex, then half if necessary.

 

[jtara]

You won't have a DNS server running on your Mac Pro by default. If you want to run DNS, you have to configure DNS.

It also won't act as a gateway by default. Again, you would have to configure this.

I'm assuming you want the TV to be able to access both your local network and the Internet, and the latter is why you even need DNS.

I don't recommend using your Mac as a gateway.

A more conventional approach would be to put a router in front of both your Mac and TV (and you probably have a router already anyway...) and have the router handle DHCP. Your router probably has a built-in Ethernet switch. If not, get an Ethernet switch (preferably 1000-base-t) - they are cheap.

Optionally, you can configure a caching DNS server on your router. Otherwise, the router will just hand-out the address of your DNS address(s) it gets from your modem (assuming you have the router configure the WAN port using DHCP.)