Share Your Mac’s Wireless Airport Network Connection With Your XBox 360

Upon moving, I hit a slight problem in the world of video games — the room that’s now home to my XBox 360 is not wired for network connectivity. The horror! If you’ve had the same problem, you may have also pondered the same solution: just hook the XBox up to the computer, and piggyback on its wireless connection. If your computer is a PC then you won’t have a problem, but if it’s a Mac, the process of sharing your Airport connection with your XBox 360 is a little more difficult.

Furthermore, if your wireless connection originates from an AirPort base station, you may also have some trouble. Many XBox 360 owners have reported problems getting their game console to connect to their AirPort network via the Microsoft XBox 360 wireless adapter.

So what is a XBox 360-playing Mac lover to do? Read on, and let Of Zen and Computing show you how to share your Internet connection from your Mac to your 360.

A few Google searches reveal a lot of people complaining about this problem, and a few sparse descriptions of the solution. The best one I’ve found is this post at video game blog Joystiq, but even it is written for someone who already knows what they’re doing. So to get you back fragging away on XBox Live, here is an in-depth, illustrated guide to sharing your Mac’s Internet connection with your XBox 360:

Step 1: Get Some Info From Your Mac

First things first, you need to get some IP information from the Mac whose connection you’ll be sharing.

1. Head to the command prompt (CMD+Space and search for “Terminal”, or go to Applications/Utilities and look for “Terminal”).
2. Type ifconfig en0 and hit enter.
3. Write down the IP address that appears next to “inet”. In this case, it’s 192.168.2.1.

Next, you need the IP address of your router. Go to System Settings → Network, and select “AirPort” from the drop down box labeled “Show:”. Click on “TCP/IP”. You’ll see the following screen, which will tell you the IP address of your router:

In this case, the IP address of my router is 192.168.1.1.

Step 2: Turn On Internet Connection Sharing

Go to System Preferences → Sharing and click on the “Internet” tab. Select “Airport” as the connection you wish to share, and then check off the connections with which to share it.

If your Mac has just one Ethernet jack, you’ll only see one “Built-in Ethernet”. In the screenshot below you’ll notice that I have two Ethernet ports and both are checked off; this is just because my computer has two Ethernet jacks, and I’m sharing my AirPort connection with a PC as well as my XBox 360.

After you select which device(s) are the recipient(s) of your shared AirPort connection, press the “Start” button.

Step 3: Connect Your XBox 360 to Your Mac

This step is simple — you need to connect your XBox 360 to your Mac with a network cable. You should use a cat 5e crossover cable for this, however regular cat 5 networking cable with also get the job done. Macs are able to utilize both types of cable in a situation like this.

There aren’t really any steps to doing this task. Just plug one end of the cord into the Ethernet jack on the rear of your XBox 360, and plug the other end into your Mac’s Ethernet jack.

Step 4: Manually Configure Your XBox 360 Network Settings

XBox 360 is set to automatically detect and configure your network settings. This is fine if you’re sharing a connection from a PC, but won’t work with Internet Sharing on a Mac.

1. Turn on your XBox 360, go to the dashboad, and navigate to the “System” blade.
2. Select “Network Settings”.
3. Select “Edit”.
4. On the “Basic Settings” tab, select the block of IP Address information.
5. Select “Manual”.
“IP Address” is the address we’re going to assign to the XBox 360.
• Remeber the IP address we retrieved from the command prompt earlier? Add one to the last number in that IP address, and enter it here. Mine was 192.168.2.1, so I entered 192.168.2.2.
6. For “Subnet Mask”, enter 255.255.255.0
7. “Gateway” is the IP address of the computer whose connection we’re borrowing. Enter the exact IP address that we retrieived from the command prompt earlier. In this case, it’s 192.168.2.1.
8. Select “Done”.
9. Select the block of “DNS Settings”.
10. Select “Manual”.
11. For “Primary DNS Server” and “Secondary DNS Server”, you’ll need to enter the IP address of your router, which we retrieved earlier. In this case, it’s 192.168.1.1.
12. Select “Done”.

Here is a photo of the Network Settings area of the System Settings Blade, which can be found on the XBox 360 Dashboard. This is where you’ll need to navigate to in order to manually configure the console’s network settings. You’ll have to excuse the poor quality of the photo, but it’s the best I can do without being able to take screen captures. Perhaps that’s a project for another day. Click on the thumbnail to see the full-size photo.

Here is a photo of my XBox 360’s network settings after they’ve been manually configured, and verified to work with my Mac’s AirPort connection. Click on the thumbnail to see the full-size photo.

Once everything is configured, go back to the “Network Settings” area of the “System” blade (shown in the first photo), and select “Test XBox Live connection”. If you’ve done everything correctly, you’ll be good to go.