OSX internet sharing to ethernet from airport

So, i have an OpenSolaris machine that doesn't easily do wireless, at least i don't want to spend tons of time figuring it out. Right next to it is a Mac Mini that does wireless just fine and therefore also has a spare ethernet port. Trying to be clever, i put a crossover cable between the two, turned on internet sharing from Mini and hoped for the best. The best rarely seems to happen. After once again spending too much time trying to figure out what was wrong, i put a regular ethernet cable between the two and that made things work. I knew Apples typically figure out when they need to perform the ethernet crossover dance all by themselves; i didn't know that doing it for them would cause things to break. One also has to turn on those TCP services one wants to pass through the Mac; Remote Login (ssh) and Personal Web Sharing in my case. DNS and NTP seem to run through just fine; UDP isn't on OSX's ipfw firewall map...