This afternoon I was looking up any possible ways to automatically start OS X’s Internet Sharing at boot. Given that the feature isn’t designed to be used as a permanent (in this case) airport base station Apple doesn’t provide any method of keeping the service gong across reboots. That is something that many people have given hints as to how to accomplish. Most are in editing system configuration files, and at least one is in creating a StartupItem. Now, the average Mac user doesn’t want to play around with hidden files used by Mac OS X, and StartupItems have been made obsolete by the new (as of 10.4 and first used extensively in 10.5) launchd process that runs all specially formatted plist documents in the root and system library subfolders /LaunchAgents and /LaunchDaemons. So, this afternoon I wrote my own LaunchDaemon plist to accomplish this task and have made it publicly available here on the Tenseg website. This new method of accomplishing the task that many of hinted at uses the new launchd versus the obsolete StartupItems. If you’ve been looking for a way of accomplishing this then look no further and please download this piece of software.
