Comments on: Turning your laptop into a wired to wireless router for your wirelessly challenged friends

By: brk3

brk3 — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 09:35:24 +0000

“Say you’re at a party and the only internet is a wireless router..”

Im sorry but thats the silliest premise for why you’d want to do this ever!

By: Reg

Reg — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 01:12:51 +0000

I’m going to do something really stupid here. I’m in need of help with this same situation, only in Windows. So if anyone would write me privately at adapt at kc dot rr dot com I would really appreciate it. Basically I’m blind using talking screen reading software. I’m going in a week or so to a place where their is only wireless internet, and I need to attach my IP phone to the Ethernet port of my Windows XP based laptop so I can work. I hate to bug you very intelligent Linux users about a Windows problem, but this blog entry was the only one I could find that was even close to describing what I need. Tried network bridging but, then it won’t connect to the wireless network any more, maybe because I think you need three adapters, one with internet connnection sharing enabled, and the other two for the bridge. Am I wrong about that? There has to be an easy way to do this. Thanks in advance for any ideas.

By: Notebook

Notebook — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:38:30 +0000

I tried just bridging the wireless and ethernet interfaces â€” no luck. Apparently this has to do with the AP not wanting to talk to devices which havenâ€™t registered their hardware address â€” such as the other ethernet devices. So I suspect hacking something which registers additional hardware addresses using the same interface might work, though I havenâ€™t trie

By: sh

sh — Tue, 27 May 2008 03:30:26 +0000

I do this at home, because my landlord only supplies internet over 802.11, which I dislike. At the moment I am using Linux for this purpose, however eventually I plan to try it with FreeBSD, since its wireless support is far less of a kick in the nuts than Linux’s. Try it, you’ll see!

Anyway, at first I tried just bridging the wireless and ethernet interfaces — no luck. Apparently this has to do with the AP not wanting to talk to devices which haven’t registered their hardware address — such as the other ethernet devices. So I suspect hacking something which registers additional hardware addresses using the same interface might work, though I haven’t tried it.

Two strategies remain. The simplest is to enable proxy-ARP, and add host-routes to all your ethernet hosts. This has a substantial advantage for LAN parties: now the wireless and ethernet hosts are all on the same broadcast domain!

The other strategy is to give your ethernet interface a separate subnet, and have the other hosts use that interface’s address as their default route. You could run DHCP here. There is a major caveat: most APs are way too rigid to let you add a route to your box for that second subnet, nor will they do NAT for it. So you need to be running some decent software on the AP — openwrt or whatever, or have a proper box acting as an AP.