Mac OS X client - proxies necessary?

[cwebb2]

Hi Folks,

I'm trying to get a transparent connection going, via wifi, for my wife's Mac (running OS X 10.3).

I'm a bit unclear on the docs about WinGate's setup.

I understood the docs to say that a non-Windows client must use NAT and Proxies (together) for all connections. Now I'm not sure if I understood that correctly. Should I be able to just use NAT w/o Proxies?

I've been unable to get the Mac to browse online without having WinGate setup with proxies.

Using the proxies seems to work pretty well, except for OS X's Help Viewer and, from what I've read, perhaps Quicktime and a few others. These apps have no provision for specifying a Proxy, and Help Viewer has a habit of looking for it's help files on the web, and thus it sticks waiting to connect.

Thanks for any help with this.

--
Chan

[Pascal]

All that should be necessary is for you to point your wife's MAC's default gateway and DNS servers to the WinGate machine. That should make NAT work without any difficulties, and you shouldn't need proxies then.

[cwebb2]

Thanks Pascal.

Well, that did it for proxy-free access, but....

Everything seemed fine until I tried to access Apple's help again.

Then Wingate showed a large stream of page requests, until an error popped up in WinGate's System Messages pane:
"ENS Undefined ENS memory problem - possible cause: memory exhaustion"

The page requests for Apple Help pages continued for a few more seconds and then I got a BSOD...

The Wingate History for this time period shows a large (very large) number of:
DNS A lookup "help.apple.com" and "helposx.apple.com"
and eventually the history shows a large number of
DNS: Unknown lookup "help.apple.com" and "helposx.apple.com".

Finally, just before the BSOD happened, the history shows a small group of NAT: TCP Connection to 17.254.3.25:80 (which is an Apple nameserver).

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

--
Chan

[cwebb2]

To 'close out' this topic.....

I got nerve enough to try using the Mac's help with the network connection once more - holding my breath, waiting for a blue screen...

I found a reference to the OS X Help Viewer's problems, and tried some suggested solutions.

Deleting the Help preference files as well as the Help cache seems to have done the trick.

But I also saw mentioned that the Help Viewer sometimes causes problems by trying to contact it's 'mothership' (for help updates), anytime it finds a connection to a network - not necessarily a connection that reaches the internet. I may have to install a block of some kind to prevent it.

--
Chan