Recently, I was wondering if it were possible to use my Mac's Airport connection to wirelessly connect to Xbox Live -- my 360 and cable modems are in separate rooms and I'm not shelling out $99 for a wireless adaptor. Surely, it would be wonderful if I could use my MacBook's wireless connection to hop on Xbox Live, no matter what room my Xbox 360 was in. Knowing that OS X has an internet connection sharing feature, I took it upon myself to try it out, and viola -- my Xbox 360 is now plugged into my MacBook, which is feeding it wireless internet. This method will work with any Mac with an AirPort card built-in that's connected to a WiFi network, but it's probably most useful with a laptop you can bring wherever your Xbox is.

First things first, turn off your Xbox 360 and connect a standard ethernet crossover cable from the network port of the 360 to the ethernet port on your Mac. On your Mac, go into System Preferences and select "Sharing". Click the "Internet" tab. On the "Share your connection from" drop-down, select AirPort. Check off Built-in Ethernet on the box underneath, then press 'Start'. You will get a cautionary dialogue box; accept it and your window should look like the one below.

Now, your connection won't work just yet. Your 360 will probably recognize that the network adaptor has a wire in it, but that's about it. You need to configure the IP and DNS settings on the Xbox Dashboard in order to connect to Xbox Live. Turn on your 360, go to the dahboard and navigate to the System pane. Select "Network Settings" and then "Edit Settings". Change IP settings to Manual. Back in OS X, enter Terminal and type, without quotes: "ifconfig en0". The first IP address, which is probably 192.168.2.1, is your Gateway address, so put that in on your Xbox. For IP address, put 192.168.2.2, and 255.255.255.0 for the Subnet Mask. We're almost done! After you save your settings your Xbox 360 might automatically test the new connection; ignore it, because it's going to fail. Go back into the settings menu and this time choose DNS Settings, and make this manual as well. At this point you need to go back into Terminal and type in "dig" (again, without quotes) and press enter. At the bottom of the results you will find a line saying "SERVER:" (see below). The IP address following (underlined below) is your Primary DNS server, so enter that into your Xbox. Don't put anything under Secondary DNS server.

Back in Network Settings on the Dashboard, select "Test Xbox Live Connection". If all went well, you should be able to connect to Xbox Live, and you didn't spend $99 on a crappy adaptor!

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