After Googling for hours on end looking for a solution I decided to leave a message on this forum. I hope you guys can give me a push in the right direction to solve this issue.
I am using a Macbook running OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard). This machine is connected with a wifi router and has a local IP address: 192.168.104.172.
On this Macbook I am running Windows 7 using Parallels Desktop. (Don't make fun of me now, please. I have no choice. :) ) On this (virtual) Windows 7 instance I am running an application server that I use to test web applications that I develop with a special Windows tool called Mendix.
Because our company uses primarily Macs as client machines, I test the web application in various browsers on OS X: Safari, Firefox and Chrome. I connect to the application server that runs on Windows 7 through the IP address of the Windows 7 virtual server. To put it simply: I point my browser to the IP address (10.211.55.4) and port number (8080) of the Windows 7 instance and I can start testing my web application.
For a new release of the web application we want to start using tablets, probably iPads. To test the web application, I am using an iPad that is connected to the same wifi router as my Macbook. I want to connect to the application server of the virtual Windows 7 instance. However, I can't use IP address 10.211.55.4 for testing because this is only available on the Macbook as it's a local address to that Mac. So I need to find a way to have OS X forward the HTTP request to the Windows 7 server and send the response back to the iPad.
I have been looking at port forwarding and checked out natd and ipfw but I can't get the configuration right. Maybe this isn't even the way the go I have started to ask myself. Can this issue be solved with the standard networking tools that come with OS X or do I need additional server tools to make this happen? I hope that anyone on this forum can put me back on track and help me solve the issue.