So I'm on the road with my boss . . . he brought his Mac . . . I brought my Vista x64 Dell. They only offered wired internet so I decided to try out Vista's connection sharing stuff . . . I figured I would plug in the cable and share the connection out over wifi for the Macbook. I plugged in the cable and after some fumbling around found the wizard to do this. I initially tried setting up WPA-2 with a passphrase for my Mac using friend. No dice - he couldn't associate, let alone enter the passphrase. So I dropped back down to WEP with a 13 char password. Same deal - can't associate. So I dropped down to 'open' and he was finally able to associate - but not get an IP address. At first he was blaming Vista . . . but then I had him fire up Wireshark on his end and it was pretty clear he wasn't sending any DHCP packtes. :) So then he tried manually configuring the IP / default gateway / DNS Servers and he could ping me and he could ping the DG - but couldn't surf. :( We were tired - didn't troubleshoot it much further. The next night we decided to see how the Mac experience would be . . . sharing a connection on the Mac is MUCH easier than on Vista. :( So he sets up his wifi AP SSID and enables WEP on it and I find it in Vista and double click on it to connect . . . but then I get an error almost immediately about the SSID not being available or something and I am not prompted to enter the password. I mention this to my boss and he looks over at his Macbook only to find it dumping core and rebooting. :) Vista pwns MacOS yet again. :)
To be fair - after the core dump and the reboot - he switched his SSID to open and I was then able to successfully connect up and surf the Internets via the MacOS connection sharing. Something he wasn't able to do via my Vista connection sharing (although I still blame MacOS for that).
So what have we learned?
We are the same - yet we are divided. Can't we all just get along?