You can combine iChat and Zerospan to do true peer-to-peer IM - no servers involved. Your messages (and files) are passed directly between your two computers, not over some company's central network.

Before you begin...

• Zerospan is a network application. You need to have a username to identify each of your computers.
• We recommend that you use your email address followed by "-server" or "-laptop". For example, if your email address is billg@microsoft.com you would enter billg@microsoft.com-server on your server.
• Decide on a username.

On your computer...

• Run Zerospan on your desktop computer.
• You will be prompted to enter a username for this computer.
• Enter your username that you picked above.
• You should see a list of names, which correspond to the cards in your Address Book.
• If the person you want to IM with is not already in the list, From the User menu choose Add User.
• Enter your friend's username (usually their email address).
• Find the entry for your friend and select it.
• Click the "Allow to connect" button. You should see a checkbox appear in the "Allow" column next to the name in the list.
• Make sure you are running iChat and have told it to enable Bonjour and set your status to connected.

Tell your friend to...

• Run Zerospan on their computer.
• They will be prompted to enter a username. Make sure they use the same one you have for them in your user list.
• Make sure they see your username in their user list.
• Have them mark you as "allowed to connect"

Running Zerospan

• Make sure Zerospan is still running on both computers, and you both have each other marked as "Allowed to connect"
• Make sure iChat is still running on both, and that it is configured for Bonjour.
• Each of you should (in Zerospan) find the name that corresponds to your partner
• Click the connect button.
• At this point, Zerospan will attempt to find and connect to your desktop computer. This may take a few minutes, during which you will see various weird status messages.
• If the connection succeeds, the text on the side of the list will read Connected, and the button will change its label to "Disconnect" - don't click that button until you're done using iChat, though.
• If you encountered an error, see TroubleshootingZerospan?.

Sharing your thoughts, files

• Congratulations, your two computers are now bridged with Zerospan.
• Open iChat. You should see an entry for your friend in the Bonjour list, and be able to chat and send files as normal.