One of the good things about the new mac, is that you can easily access your local website development environment on the Internet Explorer from a windows system as well without the use of a second computer. Especially when developing websites it is a must to check your implementations on different browsers such as Internet Explorer as most of the people will use that one.
I found a good tutorial on how to set up virtual hosts with parallels and OS X, but I had to configure some more settings to get it work.
The whole idea is to stay on the same network in your OS X and your windows installation (using parallels) to be able to access your local web server. I use 10.1.2.* for that matter. There are some other ways such as accessing your virtual host directly by ip, which only works if you have only one virtual host installed. And you still have to stay on the same network, so if you change to another internet connection (i.e. changing location) you might need to adjust your settings as your network changed.
You can have a set up working all the time with the use of a secondary ip on both systems installed on your mac (windows installed with parallels).
1) Setting up your OS X
Set up your web server on your OS X the manner that you have a virtual host on the ip “10.1.2.2″. Your httpd.conf would look something like this:
Listen 10.1.2.2:80
<VirtualHost 10.1.2.2:80>
ServerName www.romazini.com
ServerAlias romazini.* www.romazini.*
ServerAdmin webmaster@romazini.com
DocumentRoot /www/romazini.com/doc
CustomLog /www/romazini.com/log/access_log cookies
ErrorLog /www/romazini.com/log/error_log
...
</VirtualHost>
Duplicate your network port on System Preferences / Network by choosing “Network Port Configurations” in the dropdown. I just duplicated the AirPort and set the ip “10.1.2.2″.
Add the following line to your /etc/hosts on your OS X (be sure to use a tab between the ip and the host):
10.1.2.2 romazini.localhost
Now you should be able to access your virtual host from a browser on your OS X. You might need to wait a little until the changes are recognised by your system (you can check with “ping romazini.localhost”).
2. Set up your windows xp
Next step is to set up a secondary ip on your windows on the same network, i.e. “10.1.2.3″. Go to Systemsteuerung / Netzwerkverbindungen / LAN-Verbindung / TCP/IP / Eigenschaften and Click on the tab “Alternative Konfiguration” where you can add a your secondary ip, such as “10.1.2.3″ in my case.
Add the following line to the file C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (with notepad)
10.1.2.2 romazini.localhost
That’s it. You should now be able to access your local host from the windows system as well. By the way: I had to change the Network Adapter to “Shared networking” in parallels to make it work. Don’t know why exactly.
Technorati Tags: parallels, webserver, virtualhost
