Tell them, my song.

This has been a problem for quite a while now, but only yesterday I have taken the time to fix it. Before yesterday, only OS X properly shared its Internet connection and on Vista it was a no go. Of course I knew about Internet Connection Sharing, but it didn’t work in my network setup at home.

I have Vista 64 on a separate hard disk on my Mac Pro and OS X Leopard on another. As I’ve posted before, I’m forced to surf via UMTS/3G, provided by a Huawei USB stick, and I need to share this connection with the rest our machines at home. The built-in wireless LAN of the Mac Pro emits only a rather weak signal which is not sufficient to cover the whole place, so I have ‘recycled’ my old D-Link 624 wireless LAN router that was once connected to a DSL modem on its WAN port. This additional wireless LAN router, which, naturally, hosts yet another network, is a bit too much for Vista’s rather limited Internet Connection Sharing capabilities and requires some special treatment.

What I am now doing is this: I have en0 (my Mac’s first Ethernet port) connected to the WAN port of the router and en1 is connected to one of the router’s regular LAN ports for client machines. I do not use the Mac’s wireless LAN card at all, but use the WLAN router instead.

I now share my UMTS connection through en0 in both Vista and OS X. While this was a trivial thing to setup in OS X, it was a whole lot more cumbersome in Vista and required some changes in the router setup as well. The good news is that the required router setup for Vista also works well with OS X.

What you need to know are some important information that Microsoft has not documented properly, if they have documented it at all: Microsoft’s ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) uses a dedicated class C network 192.168.0.0 with the Internet Connection Sharing host/gateway located on 192.168.0.1 – and this cannot be configured or changed. If this network is already in use by another network interface in your ICS machine — as, of course, it was the case in my original setup — you will get some ugly and undocumented error messages and Vista refuses to enable ICS. It took me a while to figure this out.

Again: Microsoft’s ICS ONLY works with the network 192.168.0.0/24. You are not allowed to manually assign this network to an interface on your Vista ICS host!

The next thing that Microsoft does not tell you is that Vista’s ICS does not support DNS forwarding, which was another problem in my setup. My client machines are not directly a part of the ICS network, but they are located on a second network which is routed to the ICS gateway through the D-Link router. This is something that Microsoft does not directly support.

To make this work, I had to configure the router’s WAN port to use an IP address of the 192.168.0.0/24 ICS network and I had to configure the DNS servers manually using the IP addresses of my provider’s DNS servers. (ipconfig /all or ifconfig are your friends here – the commands will tell you which DNS servers your UMTS interface uses.)

That basically did the trick. If Microsoft had documented this properly, it wouldn’t have taken me a couple of hours and tons of googling to find a working solution.

There’s still one thing left that doesn’t work, though: Incoming network traffic through en0 does not automatically fire up the UMTS connection, although this is enabled in the connection settings. I always have to connect manually to the Internet, but then everyone else coming from the WLAN router can surf the web.

In OS X, I only had to make sure that the Internet connection is shared through en0 and that this interface always uses the 192.168.0.0/24 network to be able to communicate with the D-Link router. I did so by changing the network card’s settings to “Use DHCP with a manual address” and assigning 192.168.0.1 to it. Now both operating systems share their UMTS Internet connection with the remaining machines connected to my WLAN router.

I was a bit surprised when I read that IBM checked out of the race and eventually Oracle stepped in to buy Sun. The interesting thing here is that Oracle didn’t manage to buy MySQL AB in the past, because the owners refused to sell to Oracle (if I remember it right). Now Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, finally got his wish through the backdoor, because the MySQL AB had not been so picky about Sun’s offer a few months ago and sold out to them.

The question is what Oracle will do with MySQL, which, after all, is the most popular open source database and used on millions of websites. My personal wish is that Oracle opens MySQL even further than it already is: They should change the MySQL connector licenses to LGPL instead of GPL. For example, the .NET connector for MySQL originally was licensed under the LGPL so that people could write commercial applications even with the Community Edition of MySQL in the back end. Then MySQL AB bought the .NET connector and re-licensed it under the GPL. That put an end to writing closed source applications that wanted to use the Community Edition of MySQL. You had to purchase commercial licenses from MySQL if you wanted to write closed source software.

I think that from Oracle’s perspective, the MySQL database server is more like an entry-level, low end database server. We will see a lot of migration tools from MySQL to the “real thing” coming in the future, and probably MySQL’s syntax will soon support more Oracle features and will become more compatible with official SQL standards. But somehow I doubt that Oracle believes that they will sell a lot of commercial MySQL licenses. Their hopes will be in selling support contracts and upgrades to the full-blown Oracle database server instead. So it would make sense for them to re-license the MySQL connectors under the LGPL or some other, more closed source friendly license. I think it’s easier to attract commercial customers if you don’t force them into either buying immediately or open sourcing their software.

Now what about Solaris and Java? In all honesty, I, personally, couldn’t care less – I don’t use or need either. I don’t think that Oracle has a lot of interest in the Open Source/Community editions of those products, but Oracle has a serious interest in both technologies. They can sell their database servers with their own operating system (now Solaris) running on their own hardware from now on. And they have always supported Java and its been a de facto standard for enterprise level software for many years now. Server-side Java and Solaris on the server will have a bright future. But on the desktop? I don’t think they will invest any resources into that.

What about OpenOffice.org? Well, Oracle is not a desktop company. Unless they want to become one and launch a full blown attack against Microsoft, OpenOffice.org has little to no significance for Oracle. My bet is that this product will die a slow death in the hands of an overwhelmed – and overstrained – open source community.

What about Oracle’s rip-off of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the so-called “Unbreakable Linux”? They’ll probably drop it in favor of the freshly acquired Solaris operating system. Which would also make sense for Oracle. Why support and invest into a technology that you don’t – and cannot – own when you just purchased a battle-tested, enterprise-ready operating system of which many people say that it is vastly superior to any available flavor of Linux?

The only thing that could affect me personally is what Oracle is going to do with MySQL. We have a few open source applications in use at work that use the MySQL database server. And if Oracle changes the licenses for the connectors, I could imagine to begin using MySQL for my own pet projects again. But PostgreSQL is a great alternative to MySQL, so it doesn’t really matter.