I bought an Ipod touch on Saturday at Best Buy. I could not resist – it is just too awesome. That and I misheard the price.

When used in an environment with Wifi, this thing is about as cool as it gets. Youtube, safari and itunes all work smooth as butter.

Take it to work, and things change…

I have no wifi at work, and there is an atmosphere of fear regarding internet use. My phone (T-mobile Dash) has GPRS internet that I can use on the phone, or share with my laptop, but I wanted to show off the Ipod.

Here was the plan: I share the phone internet with the laptop via bluetooth, then share that internet over ad-hoc wifi on the laptop.

Brilliant!

So after quite a bit of fumbling, I got the bluetooth PAN working, then I tried to share the internets.

No Dice.

Windows complains that the IP needed for ICS is in use.
ICS uses 192.168.0.1 as the gateway IP and DHCP server, and no other computer may use this IP.

To cut a long story short, the Internet sharing features in Windows Mobile are more flexible than Windows XP – you just have to fudge with the registry.

I changed the IP for the bluetooth PAN to be 10.0.0.1, and cleared out the last used DHCP address. After doing this, the bluetooth PAN worked, and ICS worked, allowing me to share the internets with my ipod touch.

I may update later with more details. I have to reinstall windows now.