UPDATE: I’ve been getting a lot of traffic from Google on this post and I imagine many of you are looking for instructions. So I’ve embedded a video from YouTube user chr15b that shows you how to enable internet sharing on Mac OS X Lion.
One thing I happen to do every day when I come to work is to share my office’s internet connection with my phone. The connection comes in to my MacBook Pro through Ethernet and I then broadcast it to my phone over WiFi using the Sharing options in System Preferences. It’s a really easy way for me to cut down on my mobile data use when I’m sitting at my desk, since my office doesn’t offer a WiFi connection.
The unfortunate part of this happy little feature in Snow Leopard is that when I go back home and try to connect to my WiFi network there, I have to go back into System Preferences and turn off internet sharing so my Airport would go back to receiving mode instead of broadcasting. This was not a major annoyance, but certainly something that, after a long time of doing every day, got a bit tedious.
After recently upgrading to OS X Lion, I was delighted to discover that this process of constantly needing to toggle internet sharing is a thing of the past. Now I can keep internet sharing enabled, and OS X Lion detects when an ethernet connection is present. Lion turns on sharing automatically when ethernet is connected and turns it off when ethernet is unplugged. No manual toggling required. It just works.
Internet Sharing is ridiculously malfunctioning on Lion. There’s about 20 different topics on the apple support forums. Their interface might be improved, but the functionality is not.
I can confirm what Brendan says..
There’s a big issue in Lion regarding the Internet Sharing option..
I confirm too. Lots of problems with what before worked 🙁
I confirm too. The main problem is that you can no longer share a Wi-Fi connection over Wi-Fi. So for instance I’m in a hotel now on the Wi-Fi network and under Snow Leopard I could make a hotspot for my iPads. Lion killed that option, so the iPads are high and dry now. They totally regressed here.
I am having a hard time to use my Mac as a wifi center also. What to do now? This can’t be used anymore??
Lion internet sharing is a mess!!!
No way to make it working…..help me please! 🙁
Works for me running OSX 10.7.2, on MBA (late 2010). Able to access from iPhone 4s with no issue!
Yes you can!! encrypt your network with128bit encrypted password. and wait for about 30 sec after you turn on your internet sharing. It works for me.. MBP late 2008, 10.7.2 shares internet to iphone and ipad..
It has worked for me more reliably since I set a password, thanks for the tip and thanks all for commenting!
sorry, tried all day from my Lion iMac to my Snow Leopard laptop with no results.
Now you can just click Wi-Fi -> Create Network… and press OK
Yes it is much harder 😀 lol
Good tip!