I am trying to set up an Ad Hoc network between my PC running Vista and my Macbook running Leopard. It's not just the Ad Hoc network though. I have Visual Studio Developer Express and SQL Studio Express running on the PC. When I launch a web service on localhost from Visual Studio, I want the Mac to be able to access the web service on my pc (localhost). I am accessing the web service on the mac through the iphone simulator in xcode.
Basically, I am trying to access my Vista localhost web service from the iphone simulator in xCode on my mac over an ad hoc wireless network.
I tried setting up the ad hoc wireless network, but I can't even access the web service in Firefox on the mac using :
http://(ipadress):(port)/webservice.asmx
At this point the Mac has not even shown up in my network on the PC.
Can anyone point me in the right direction or let me know if this is even possible? Do I have to disable firewalls possibly?
Thanks
Best Answer
It shouldn't be a problem - by default in an ad-hoc environment where you are not running a DHCP server or setting static ip's the systems should both end up with automatically assigned private ip-addresses in the link-local address range ( 169.254.0.0/16 subnet for ipv4 )and should be able to communicate. If your systems connect to each other at the physical layer but don't end up with ipv4 addresses in this range then one or other of the relevant zero-configuration services are probably disabled.
I'd be surprised if you didn't have to disable the client firewall on the target (Windows Vista) System. This is exactly the sort of casual connectivity that the Windows Firewall is intended to block unless you explicitly tell it not to.
In a Windows environment systems broadcast based NetBIOS name resolution mechanisms will kick in (provided they are enabled and the systems are configured to treat the ad-hoc network as trusted rather than public). I believe MAC OS X also supports NetBIOS name resolution but I don't know if it is enabled by default.
Apple's Bonjour and SSDP\UpNP on Microsoft systems provide more general purpose\robust name resolution services in link-local setups. You can install a Windows Bonjour client to make it easier for the systems to find each other