How do I share Internet access from a USB-MobileBroadband via wireless to other computers?
I was travelling with my boss. With very few clicks, his Apple Notebook turned into an access point, allowing me to take advantage of his Internet connection via an USB-MobileBroadband modem, which was actually quite fast.
Surely, if a Mac can do it, Linux can do it too, right? How?
Note that I do not want to mess my Laptop’s configuration permanently. I just want to know how to set this up spontaneously for a limited time period.
STurtle wrote:
> How do I share Internet access from a USB-MobileBroadband via wireless
> to other computers?
>
> I was travelling with my boss. With very few clicks, his Apple Notebook
> turned into an access point, allowing me to take advantage of his
> Internet connection via an USB-MobileBroadband modem, which was actually
> quite fast.
>
> Surely, if a Mac can do it, Linux can do it too, right? How?
>
> Note that I do not want to mess my Laptop’s configuration permanently.
> I just want to know how to set this up spontaneously for a limited time
> period.
What is required to set up an access point depends on your wifi device.
Installing the hostapd package and modifying /etc/hostapd.conf may be enough;
however, most drivers need to use nl80211. For that, you need a version 0.6.0 or
later of hostapd (version 0.5.10 is what is in the repo).
You will also need a bridge device between the wireless device and the broadband
modem to complete the process. It will be transient - when hostapd is running
your computer is an access point, otherwise it is normal.
Um, what is this bridge device? Is this described somewhere?
A few years ago, I tried and failed to forward an ISDN-modem connection via Ethernet cable. The advice there entailed things like “IP-Forwarding, Masquerading, Routing-Table, Firewall,…,”
So, I do not need to mess around with all those things (which I do not understand anyway)?
YAST -> Network Devices -> Network Settings -> Overview -> “Edit wlan0” offers the setting “Master” in addition to “Managed” and “Ad-Hoc”. Althoug I prefer the networkmanager as opposed to ifup, is this related to the issue at all?
STurtle wrote:
> Um, what is this bridge device? Is this described somewhere?
>
> A few years ago, I tried and failed to forward an ISDN-modem connection
> via Ethernet cable. The advice there entailed things like
> “IP-Forwarding, Masquerading, Routing-Table, Firewall,…,”
>
> So, I do not need to mess around with all those things (which I do not
> understand anyway)?
You probably need those things - certainly IP-forwarding. It depends on what you
want to do. Check http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Bridge for a fairly
complete description of bridging. The utility brctl is in package bridge-utils.
I’m not an network expert in any way,
but I don’t think that bridge is the thing we want.
“A bridge is a way to connect two Ethernet
segments together in a protocol independent way.”
So it’s basically merging two different
physical networks into one, which is nice thing,
but not really needed here.
As I understand, what we need here is a kind of a gateway.
I tried a while ago to share PPPoE Internet access via WiFi, but did not succeed.
On the other hand, long time ago I managed to share internet connection
via wired connection just for experiment (with openSUSE 11.0 if remember correctly).
So the main problem, I suppose, would be sharing via WiFi
instead of plain wired connection.
This link may be helpful, but it says nothing about wireless connections. ICS - openSUSE