Peter Stagg Dot Com

For me, WiFi is what makes the iPod Touch a toy worth having. Take it away and you have a very low capacity Video/Audio player. On my home network the Touch’s WiFi works like a wombat digging a burrow. At work; however, WiFi devices require a VPN client and the Touch apparently does not have one.
My next thought was “what if I run up an ad-hoc airport network, would the Touch be able to connect to that.” The theory was sound enough, but in practice it looked, at first, as if that wombat wouldn’t hump. Then I read Rohit Amarnath’s article on his analytics blog. This outlined how to share a PPPSerial network connection with an iPhone using Sustainable Softworks’ IPNetShareX. With some tweaking I’ve been able to modify Rohit’s instructions and get my MacBook Pro to share its ethernet connection via an ad-hoc AirPort network with my iPod Touch.

What you need:

• Required: IPNetShareX from Sustainable Softworks
• Useful: IPNetMonitorX from Sustainable Softworks

How to do it:

Download and install IPNetShareX (I found I had to restart my machine before the application would work).

Run IPNetShareX and set the following settings:

• Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
• Router Address: 10.0.2.1

N.B. Safe addresses to use are in the 192.168.x.x and 10.0.x.x range. [ref]

• External Network Interface: Built-in Ethernet
• Internal Network Interface: AirPort

Check the following items:

• Preserve Ports
• Use Sockets
• Create Aliasing Log

And unchecked the following:

• Deny Incoming Requests
• Create Denial Logs
• Dynamic IP Binding
• Local Caching Name Server

Next; make sure AirPort switched on. When it is, click the AirPort icon in the menu-bar and select ‘Create Network’.

Give the network a name and set the encryption options if need be (I don’t think I’ve gotten encryption working yet – you may want to try it without first). Hit the OK button. Your ad-hoc (computer-to-computer) AirPort network should now be running.

Return to the IPNetShareX application and click the ‘Start Internet Sharing’ button.

Now turn to the iPod Touch itself.

Go into settings, then Wi-Fi and switch Wi-Fi on if it is off.

Choose the Network you just created from the list of available networks to establish a connection.

Touch the little round button with an arrow in it next to your connection to go into its preferences. Go to the static tab and set the following:

• IP Address: 10.0.2.211

This can be any IP address in the same range as you set IPNetShareX to except the one IPNetShareX is using.

• Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0

Same as in IPNetShareX

• Router: 10.0.2.1

The same Router Address you used for IPNetShareX

Next you need to set the DNS to the same range as your networked computer is using. If you don’t know what this is, you can use you can use the DHCP Lease tool in IPNetMonitorX to find it. It will look something like this ‘140.198.1.66, 140.198.9.66’.

Finally, if your network uses a proxy you will need to set up the HTTP proxy settings underneath the IP Address settings. In my case I found that the automatic proxy settings did not work, but the manual settings did.

That’s it you should now be able to open Safari and surf the web from your iPod Touch. One point to note however is that I couldn’t use the YouTube application on my touch in this situation – it must use a different port from the standard port 80 of HTTP. I could use the iTunes store though.

Another way to test if you have everything set up right is to open the terminal on your host computer (laptop) and ping the IP Address you gave to the Touch. A successful result should look like this: