Re: Connection sharing

[Bill Moseley <moseley hank org>]

On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 05:19:33PM -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-12-04 at 21:12 -0800, Bill Moseley wrote:
> > I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 on a Thinkpad T60p w/ Atheros wireless.
> 
> madwifi or ath5k?  Only ath5k is supported, because madwifi isn't in the
> upstream kernel.  NetworkManager only supports drivers that are shipped
> in the official Linux kernel.  Since we cannot fix binary drivers, and
> out-of-tree drivers are of questionable interoperability and quality,
> they are not supported.

I thought I was running madwifi, but according lsmod ath9k is loaded.

> Is there a checkbox next to the wifi network you just created?  The icon
> will show your *primary* internet connection, i.e. the one you are
> sharing.  But the menu will also indicate the connection which is
> sharing your primary connection.

No check box -- a radio button, yes, if that's what you mean.

> The sharing capability requires dnsmasq-base (on Ubuntu).

Yes, installing that package was all it took. Very nice!

To disable the ad-hoc network should I just select another wireless
from the drop-down (or I guess I could just disable wireless all
together).

One thing that seems different since upgrading to 8.10 is that the
wireless always connects even when on the wired LAN.  IIRC, before
nm-applet would stop the wireless when I connected to the wired LAN.
But, my memory might be wrong about that.

> If you
> install that, when you "create new wireless network", it will create an
> Ad-Hoc wifi connection and will start dnsmasq as a forwarding nameserver
> and DHCP server on that adhoc network.  Other computers that connect to
> that adhoc network will then be able to get a DHCP address.

I see.  So my Thinkpad is preforming NAT (it's address is 192.168. and
the devices that connect to it (like my iBook) is 10.42.44.10,



> *however*, since you state that other computers cannot see the newly
> created adhoc sharing network, this either indicates that you don't have
> dnsmasq installed, or it indicates driver problems.  I had to fix quite
> a few upstream drivers along the way to get adhoc networking to work
> correctly, and fix wpa_supplicant in a few cases.  These changes are in
> released kernels (2.6.27 and later) and also in the latest
> wpa_supplicant releases (0.6.5 and later).

Thanks very much for you effort.  Very impressive how well these
things work now.

-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley hank org