This post will have nothing to do with Analytics or Data Warehousing but I had such a tough time getting this to work that I figured I'd publish a post on it.

When I got my iPhone and found that the edge connection was lacking, I figured that for the most part I had an available wireless high speed connection to the internet up (wifi router at home and at the Full 360 offices, EVDO on my laptop) and should be able to use the iPhone wi-fi connection on all of those. The home and office router connections had no problems but the EVDO was another story! So to save someone else the pain of figuring this out I decided to put this into a how-to. Note that this would also work if you have a wired connection that you wanted to share out via the airport. I am also not looking to update to the iPhone 3g anytime soon.

The first thing to try is to see if the OSX internet sharing works for you.

1. Open System Preferences > Internet & Networks > Sharing

2. Select Internet, Choose the EVDO connection from the "Share your connection from:" Drop down

3. In the "To computers using:" select "Airport"

4. In the Airport Options, choose a Network Name, and set encryption if you like. I tried with and without encryption and it didnt work for me.

5. Back at the Sharing dialog, choose Firewall, and turn your Firewall on, check your Advanced options and turn off block UDP traffic (I heard that this works for some people)

6. In Services select Personal Web Sharing

7. Back to Internet and Turn your Internet Sharing On

8. Now to your iPhone

9. Go to Settings > Wi-Fi, Turn it on if it is off, and choose the network you created in step 4.

10.  if you turned on WEP, Set the password, you should have a connection at this point

11. Touch the arrow next to the connection which brings up the advanced properties

12. Select Static and put the following entries in (I use opendns for my dns servers)

IP Address: 10.0.2.211
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Router: 10.0.2.1
DNS: 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220

13. Close everything and you should have a wi-fi connection to your Mac

14. Now to see if things are really working. From your mac open up a terminal, and ping 10.0.2.211, and try opening a website on the iPhone Safari, if you are getting responses and the website shows up this should work for you, ya lucky bastich!

Unfortunately for me - I couldnt get past this, it was slow for a few seconds and then stopped working completely and I tried everything, with and without firewall, with and without WEP, Static DNS, DHCP. Since the wi-fi worked pretty well with the router I figured it was something to do with the OSX internet sharing on my machine. So I looked for an alternative and found: IPNetShareX (note that this is only free for non-commercial use)

Once set up this worked flawlessly! Here are the steps:

1. Download and Install IPNetShareX in your Applications Folder

2. Start IPNetShareX

3. Set Subnet Mask to : 255.255.255.0

4. Set Router Address to 10.0.2.1

5. Set External Network Interface to PPPSerial (ppp0)

6. Set the Internal Network Interface to "AirPort (en1)

7. Right click on your status bar for your AirPort (I dont know how to do this any other way), and select "Create Network"

8. choose a Network Name, and set encryption if you like.

9. In IPNetShareX, Click on the Start Internet Sharing

The following steps are the same as before:

10. Now to your iPhone

11. Go to Settings > Wi-Fi, Turn it on if it is off, and choose the network you created in step 4.

12. Set the password, if you turned on WEP, you should have a connection at this point

13. Touch the arrow next to the connection which brings up the advanced properties

14. Select Static and put the following entries in (I use opendns for my dns servers)

IP Address: 10.0.2.211
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Router: 10.0.2.1
DNS: 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220

15. Close everything and you should have a wi-fi connection to your Mac

16. Now to see if things are really working. From your mac open up a terminal, and ping 10.0.2.211

And lo behold your iPhone is speedy gonzalez on the internet again via the EVDO! Here is my speed test: