First the basics. I have a beagle pocket. It’s connected to a Macbook Pro, running Sierra (10.12.6). I connect using a USB cable and after a short delay I get two entries in my networking pane. BeagleBone (192.168.7.1) and BeagleBone 2(192.168.6.1). I have internet sharing turned off.
At this point I am able to successfully ssh to my board and login. I use:
$ssh debian@beaglebone.local
debian@beaglebone:~$ route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.6.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.252 U 0 0 0 usb1
192.168.7.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.252 U 0 0 0 usb0
debian@beaglebone:~$ ifconfig
lo: flags=73<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING> mtu 65536
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 255.0.0.0
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128 scopeid 0x10
loop txqueuelen 1 (Local Loopback)
RX packets 480 bytes 34400 (33.5 KiB)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 480 bytes 34400 (33.5 KiB)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
usb0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 192.168.7.2 netmask 255.255.255.252 broadcast 192.168.7.3
inet6 fe80::6264:5ff:fe45:1b63 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x20
ether 60:64:05:45:1b:63 txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
RX packets 392 bytes 83626 (81.6 KiB)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 305 bytes 78511 (76.6 KiB)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
usb1: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 192.168.6.2 netmask 255.255.255.252 broadcast 192.168.6.3
inet6 fe80::6264:5ff:fe45:1b66 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x20
ether 60:64:05:45:1b:66 txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
RX packets 146 bytes 38517 (37.6 KiB)
RX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 frame 0
TX packets 111 bytes 24192 (23.6 KiB)
TX errors 0 dropped 0 overruns 0 carrier 0 collisions 0
Any attempt to turn the mac’s internet sharing on, causes the two networking entries BeagleBone (192.168.7.1) and BeagleBone 2(192.168.6.1) to stop woking. BeagleBone goes red and reports not connected, BeagleBone 2 stays green but the SSH connection freezes. Communications with the board dies.
The only solution at this point is to disconnect the board from the USB cable and turn off internet sharing and then reconnect the board on USB.