Serving OS X Apache to a Parallels Windows client

March 29, 2007 at 3:42 am · Filed under Hardware, Applications

I’m currently creating a Vista Sidebar Gadget, and needed to work with it on a PC to ensure my HTML was rendering correctly. All of my HTML and image files are own my Mac, and I have Parallels running Windows as a guest operating system. All I needed to do is to allow the PC guest OS to have access to the Apache web server on the OS X side.

I found a few articles on how to do this-most involve network configuration settings on both the OS X Parallels Network Adapter and on Windows. It also involves cracking open the C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file and making an update, which is easy, but I doubt the generalist is interested in doing.

Here’s a simple, quick solution: Bonjour. I didn’t know there was Bonjour for Windows, but there is (which in retrospect makes sense with iTunes having a PC program). Here’s the drill:

1. On the Parallels Windows guest OS, download and install the Bonjour for Windows client.
2. On the Parallels Windows guest OS, open Internet Explorer, and enable Bonjour by clicking on the Bonjour Icon in the Toolbar (this might not be necessary-clicking it will, at the least, show a list of printers Bonjour has detected on the network in a pane on the left-hand side of IE, confirming that Bonjour is running).
3. On the Macintosh, go to System Preferences > Sharing and enable Windows Sharing and Personal Web Sharing. When you enable Windows Sharing, make a note of the IP address that OS X assigns. In my case, it was 172.20.1.111
4. On the Macintosh, verify your Apache Server is fine. Open a browser instance and navigate to:http://localhost/You should see the Apache web server default page (”Seeing this instead of the website you expected?”).
5. On the Parallels Windows guest OS, open navigate to the IP address that OS X declared when you enabled Windows sharing in Step 3:http://172.20.1.11/If everything is clicking right, you should be seeing the same Apache web server default page you’re seeing on the Mac.

That should be it!

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