Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Dan Farrell <dan@×××××××××.cx>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Sharing an internet connection
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:50:57
Message-Id: 20090312165055.30a6d68c@spore.ath.cx
In Reply to: [gentoo-user] Sharing an internet connection by Grant
1 On Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:26:45 -0700
2 Grant <emailgrant@×××××.com> wrote:
3
4 > I travel with a strong external antenna for picking up faint wireless
5 > signals. It works great, but my girlfriend struggles to connect with
6 > her built-in antenna. I do have a travel router (D-Link DWL-G730) so
7 > I'd like to be able to do something like this:
8
9 > WAN->my laptop->travel router->girlfriend's laptop
10
11 That sounds right to me. Read on...
12
13 > I use wicd and I'm not sure how to go about this, especially since my
14 > laptop DHCPs for an IP from the WAN so I'm not sure how to define the
15 > gateway for the travel router when following this:
16
17 I don't have experience with wicd or the DWL-G730, but I did do a
18 little research on those and have suggestions.
19
20 If I were setting this up myself it would be with another Wifi card in
21 AP mode, which I'd be running DHCP on. In that case, the client (in
22 this case your girlfriend's laptop) would be given a DHCP address and a
23 default route of my AP's address. Alternately I might forego the DHCP
24 server setup and instruct the client to set a particular IP and route
25 (the route would be my AP's IP). In either case, nameservers could be
26 copied directly from "my laptop" to the client's, or "my laptop" could
27 supply its own IP for nameserver and provide DNS service or proxy
28 itself.
29
30 "My laptop" would then have a route through the AP for internal traffic,
31 and use the (dhcp provided) default route for other traffic.
32 Therefore, the AP would never need to specify the IP of the external
33 connection.
34
35 The client box would route all traffic through the AP's IP so it
36 wouldn't need to know the external IP either.
37
38 "My laptop" would have to run IPTables for NAT. You'll need network
39 address translation because external IPs like websites won't be able to
40 route to the client box's IP. NAT gets around this.
41
42 The AP provided by "my laptop" must also be on a different subnet than
43 the external network "my laptop" is connected to. If "my laptop" was
44 connected to an access point offering a 192.168.1.0/24 subnet, for
45 example, a seperate subnet like 192.168.2.0/24 ought to be used on the
46 "client side" of "my laptop". Personally I'd probably use an rfc class
47 b subnet since they're rare, or another rare subnet like
48 192.168.66.0/24.
49
50 > http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/home-router-howto.xml
51 >
52 > Is there a simple way to pull this off?
53
54 In short, no, but it's not too complicated, and the home router guide
55 will help you, but using your travel router may make things more
56 complicated. The travel router probably will itself provide NAT and
57 DHCP so I'm not sure without playing with one how it would look to set
58 it up that way. You might want to provide those services yourself and
59 use the travel router as an AP instead.

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] Sharing an internet connection Grant <emailgrant@×××××.com>