mamp

(This tip should also work similarly with Vista, Windows 7, etc.).

After browsing around a bunch of different forums, the MAMP site, and Parallels documentation, I was still flummoxed by Parallels' weird Shared Host networking behavior, which seemingly didn't allow me to access virtualhosts I set up with MAMP for developing sites locally.

After much experimentation, I found that the simplest way to be able to type in 'local.example.com' (or 'dev.example.com', if that's your style) in Internet Explorer on Windows, and get a virtual host running via MAMP on my Mac, is to do the following:

Besides business applications, one of the main reasons to run a copy of Windows in a Virtual Machine (using either VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop) on your Mac is to test software and websites. I recently ran into a problem, though, when I wanted to test some PHP-based websites that were running on my Mac under MAMP (stands for Mac Apache, MySQL and PHP).

The problem is this: Even if you have the Windows set up with bridged networking, you will not be able to see the websites running on your Mac if you type in the Mac's IP address. This problem can be solved pretty easily, though, if you simply tell Windows exactly where Internet Explorer needs to look, by editing the 'hosts' file (which tells Windows where to look for specific IP addresses).