Xbox 360 and the Mac: A bridge too far?

Once upon a time in a room far far away (upstairs)...

There' s a line that will never start a Star Wars movie!

Back to the matter at hand...

I used to have my Xbox 360 connected via trustworthy ethernet cable when along came the desire to move it upstairs. Along with it however was the issue of connectivity.

Initially I used a variety of wireless bridge solutions (and being a bit of a geek I swapped this in and out on a whim, trying to get a more optimal solution to an already solved problem). Later I used a Power Plug Ethernet-over-power setup which worked well.

Times and circumstances changed and I found myself very much like I do now. An Xbox 360 in the same room, only this time no wireless bridge and no power plug adapters.

Whats a geek to do? Well, we solve the problem again, but in a new way. By this stage I was using Snow Leopard on the iMac. So I used a cross-over cable and used the internet sharing features in OSX SL.

The only issue with such an arrangement was the introduction of additional NAT, the internet sharing facility NATs between en0/en1.

Xbox<--CrossOver-->en0 NAT--> iMac en1 <--Airport Wireless-->Internet Router |--NAT--Public Internet


Initially I thought there was some misunderstanding - one could easily bridge interfaces in Windows! Alas I could not natively bridge the interfaces.

I looked into IPNetRouterX which listed this capability, but sadly appears to be Leopard (not snow leopard) compatible. It's possible I could not configure it correctly. Maybe.

Faced with some time on my hands I tried something new:

I used VMware Fusion to build a Ubuntu VM and attached two virtual NICs. One bridging to en0 and the other to en1. I then configured Ubuntu to bridge the two virtual interfaces.

Now I have Xbox Live 'Open' NAT without additional port forwarding rules, with Ubuntu allowing the Xbox to exist on the same subnet.

Performance? I have nothing scientific to report, but latency feels reduced - only backed up with a better "signal bar" in the likes of COD:MW2/FIFA10 etc.

I'm happy with the solution, I'll post the resources I used later for those that might be interested.