Re: Sharing connection

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sun, 2007-06-24 at 11:27 +0200, Dawid Wr� wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Jun 2007 14:35:56 +0200 "Antonio Bulgheroni"
> <antonio bulgheroni gmail com> wrote:
> 
> > Great! I will wait for that....
> It would be even better if it was possible to set up a simple AP
> on the wifi card to share the internet. It shouldn't
> introduce a lot of code, most of the things (bridging) will
> be/are done anyway as a part of connection sharing feature. 
> There would only be a need to change the mode of the card into master.
> (like we do it now with iwconfig). Unfortunately not all the drivers
> support mode changing this way, although let's hope it will
> change in the future as the drivers will be ported to the unified
> mac80211 stack.

NM probably won't set master (AP) mode at all, for a number of reasons:

1) most drivers right now don't support master mode, or have a lot of
hoops to jump through to get to master mode (different firmware, restart
card, reload modules, etc).  Many of the drivers that do (ie, based on
mac80211) just aren't usable enough yet.

2) Master mode is less tested on many drivers, if they support it

3) wpa_supplicant doesn't support master mode, nor should it

4) You have to start and manage a lot more daemons, like dhcpd

Both Windows (usually) and OS X (always) set the card to adhoc mode, set
a self-assigned IPv4 address, and then NAT the connection.  That's the
route we're likely to take with NetworkManager, because it's the
simplest way to get there, and it works reasonably well.  If people
_really_ want a dedicated AP, that's what hostapd is for.  We can
revisit AP-mode in the future, but I believe adhoc is the immediate
solution.

Dan