I spent almost 1 day trying to find out why I couldn’t ping a NI of the server (192.168.2.200/24) from some Mac OS X 10.4 clients of the LAN while I could from the others.
It turned out being Internet Sharing that was activated on the misbehaving clients.
The clients were sharing Internet access from built-in Ethernet using built-in FireWire and I found that when Internet Sharing is activated Mac OS X always assigns 192.168.2.1/24 to the FireWire interface, even if that IP is already used by another client’s NI or if the FireWire interface already has a manual IP distinct from 192.168.2.1. Try it by yourself running ‘ifconfig -fw0’ before and after starting Internet Access.
1) Could someone please confirm this behaviour?
2) Could it be considered a bug? It makes it impossible for me to connect to services running on the server’s NI 192.168.2.200 if I want to simultaneously share the Internet connection through the FireWire interface. I think Internet Sharing should not assign an already used IP to the FireWire NI and that there should be a way to specify IP ranges that shoud not be automatically assigned. Any other opinion?
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