Product Reviews

You have two or three Macs you want to connect to the Internet, but only one line. What's the best solution? Adding more phone lines and modems or extra ISDN lines, not to mention extra Internet access accounts, is messy and expensive. Farallon's Internet Sharing Starter Kit simplifies things by providing the hardware and software you need to get two Macs onto the Internet via a single connection.

The Internet Sharing Starter Kit is a carefully thought-out bundle. It consists of a five port Farallon Starlet 10Base-T Ethernet hub, a pair of two-metre Ethernet cables, and a couple of Ethernet PCI cards with Mac and PC drivers. The Ethernet cards will, of course, mean more to those with PCs as well as Macs, as virtually every Mac made in the past three years has Ethernet support built-in. So far, this is a useful bundle, but nothing out of the ordinary. However, when you install the bundled Vicom SurfDoubler software, you can share an Internet connection between any two computers on your new network at once.

When you run SurfDoubler for the first time, an Auto Setup Wizard steps in to help you get things working correctly. This is a very simple process which uses any existing settings already in place as much as possible. A PPP setup is available for those with modems or ISDN Terminal Adaptor connections, while those lucky enough to have ADSL or cable modems get an Ethernet-based setup. At the end of the process your Mac is given a new Vicom configuration in the TCP/IP control panel. Check your AppleTalk control panel is set to work via Ethernet, and you're ready to start sharing your surftime with another networked computer.

SurfDoubler includes a complete MacIP server which automatically

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configures the TCP/IP settings on the host Mac, as well as built-in DHCP features to manage the network information for client computers. DNS Cacheing stores domain names and matching IP addresses to help speed up general browsing, and Network Address Translation (NAT) network address mapping is taken care of automatically.

This is the core of how it works - two computers share a single IP address on an ad hoc basis. When a user tries to get online, by checking for mail, requesting a Web page and so on, the request is passed to SurfDoubler. This automatically connects to the Internet and passes back the results, whether it's a Web page, email, or whatever, and it can be configured to drop the line after a period of inactivity to help keep phone bills down.

Just remember that if you're using a modem to connect, you're effectively sharing the limited bandwidth between two computers, so you may not see particularly impressive speeds if both users are surfing at the same time.

The Starlet Ethernet hub provides five ports, so connecting up to five devices, both printers and Macs, is simple. If you need more ports, you can either use the uplink option to connect one port to another Ethernet hub, daisychaining them together, or just get a hub with more ports. You will of course need to get more Ethernet cables unless you have just two devices to connect, but this is a good package for smaller setups.

The SurfDoubler software packs a lot of functionality into a small, easy-to-use package. If you want to get started with Ethernet and you want to get two Macs (or a Mac and PC) onto the Internet using a single connection, this package is worth considering. If you need to connect more computers at once, you'll need to get hold of more cables. And if you want to provide Internet access for more people at once, you can exchange the SurfDoubler part of the package for Vicomsoft's SoftRouter Plus or Internet Gateway, two products designed to deal with larger workgroups.

If you don't need the networking hardware, you may be better off picking up SurfDoubler separately, as you're paying partly for the hardware in this starter kit. But any Internet user thinking of wiring a few Macs together should certainly consider Farallon's impressive new package deal.