Geekish Stuff » Mac

How to change iPhone iOS 4.3 Personal Hotspot SSID name

braceta — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:57:30 +0000

Great! iOS 4.3 is out with this new Personal Hotspot thing which enable you to share your iPhone internet connection via Wifi, to devices around you. Something some Android versions and MIFy could do it for some time now.

As usual with Apple it’s really easy to use, as to just turn it on the from the Settings app, Personal Hotspot menu.

It will start sharing your internet connection with a given password via Wifi and USB at the same time, if you have the iPhone connected to your Mac. There’s also a 3rd option to share it via Bluetooth only, as well.

Although very easy to use, you can’t change the Wifi name SSID, at least on the phone (bummer..). This name is taken from your iPhone name in iTunes.

So my tip, in order to rename your Wifi SSID you need to change your iPhone Name on iTunes. Just take a look at the screenshot on the left.

Easy, now your Personal Hotspot Wifi name is renamed to whatever you want.

Mac OS X Airport Internet Sharing with Ubuntu with WEP

braceta — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:42:58 +0000

Have you ever tried Internet Sharing in Mac OS X for Ubuntu clients, using WEP? Did it work for you at the very first time? If not this post is for you… :)

I own a 3G HSDPA internet card for my Macbook Pro and I need to share my connection to my Ubuntu laptop.

Easy, you goto System Preferences, select Sharing icon and click “Internet Sharing” for computers using Airport. If you don’t use WEP to encrypt your Wireless connection you’ll have one open Access Point to the world. So I need to use WEP to secure my network since Mac OS X Leopard does not create wireless networks with encryption other than WEP… damn!

Ok, lets create the wireless network and place a password. The problem with this “password” is that when you try to use Ubuntu NetworkManager it simply doesn’t work. Still don’t know why, but I believe it’s a Mac OS X problem, since my Windows box doesn’t work either.

So instead of typing a simple password, use a hexadecimal WEP key. Let’s consider you choose a WEP key in hexadecimal form 1234567890. You need to create your network in Mac OS X with the following key: $1234567890

The “$” tells Mac OS X the key is in hexadecimal and not a simple pass phrase. Hexadecimal keys must be 10 chars wide for 40bit WEP or 26 chars wide for 128bit WEP.

Now use the same key in Ubuntu and NetworkManager but without the “$“.

If everything went fine you’ll be able to share your internet connection.

VMWare Fusion Airport Bridged Interface

braceta — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:19:04 +0000

Today I needed that my bridged interface for my Linux Virtual Machine in VMWare Fusion was bind to the Airport network card instead of the wired ethernet card. I wanted that may wireless hosts could access my VM in the wireless network from other hosts.
By the way this was an Ad-Hoc network created with Internet Sharing option in Mac OS X system preferences, so that I can share internet to my home.

In order to VMWare Fusion start to bind your virtual bridge interfaces you need to edit the file at:

/Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/boot.sh

Locate in the file the following code:

# vmnet-bridge puts itself in background (daemon mode)
# Bridge to host network interface 'en0'.
#"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet0.pid vmnet0 en0
# Bridge to the primary host network interface (which can change over time).
"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet0.pid vmnet0 ''

And change to this:

# vmnet-bridge puts itself in background (daemon mode)
# Bridge to host network interface 'en0'.
"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet0.pid vmnet0 en1
# Bridge to the primary host network interface (which can change over time).
# "$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet0.pid vmnet0 ''

Notice I’ve change the en0 interface (the wired NIC) to en1 (the Airport).

Restart VMWare services, including vmnet-bridge by issuing the following command:

sudo /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/boot.sh --restart

Yeahh.. Now my VM discovered an IP address on the wireless network. (DHCP was running on the Airport interface since I was using Internet Sharing in Mac OS X Leopard).