Accessing Apache Running on Leopard with Parallels (Windows)
I work on an application that only works in IE 6+ so moving to the mac has required me to find a way to test the application. I have found that about 90% of it works in Safari (but not FF) but the remaining 10% is critical to access at some points for testing.
Because of this I have been using Parallels running Windows 2k3. Basically the only thing I run on it is IE7 and I needed it to be able to access the Apache instance running on Leopard. Since Apache is running on 127.0.0.1, and Parallels was using shared networking, 127.0.0.1 and the actual IP address would never reach Apache.
After some looking around it appears that Parallels uses a NAT service that creates a local IP address for both the host OS (Leopard) and the guest OS (Win2k3). because of this I can use that IP address to access both machines back and forth. Here is how..
- Find the IP address that Parallels assigns the host OS. This can be done by doing Terminal > ifconfig. Find the IP address for en3 (if you have more then one network adapter this could be en4 etc). Copy that.
- 2. In the guest OS (windows) create a host entry by editing C:\{windows root}\system\drivers\etc\hosts
hostcomputer 10.211.55.2[the address you copied]
(I actually just changed the localhost entry to make things easier, you might not want to do that though)
That’s it. Put in http://hostcomputer in IE and it should pull up your Apache instance on Leopard.
Alan on July 10th, 2008
worked like a charm, but my IP address was actually in a section called ppp0 which appeared after en3. thanks for the great tip here.