Re: Making a hotspot out of your computer

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2010-08-18 at 08:07 +0200, Jaap A. Haitsma wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In case you have not seen my posts on planet GNOME I thought I share
> them here. Some people made technical comments with hints on how to
> implement full hotspot functionality in nm.
> http://jaap.haitsma.org/2010/08/16/make-a-portable-hotspot-of-your-laptop-connectify/
> http://jaap.haitsma.org/2010/08/17/make-portable-hotspot-with-gnome-network-manager/

Yeah, I'm going to reply with a blog post too, I've been thinking about
this for a whiel ever since all the phones (Evo, Epic, Android 2.2) have
been coming out with easy mobile hostspot functionality since June.
There are some caveats:

1) driver's AP-mode support is much less complete in general than STA
mode; and when the do have support, there are often more bugs.
Unfortunately, like Ad-Hoc WPA mode right now, we aren't able to get
very good error details about when stuff doesn't work.

2) we need to update our wpa_supplicant support to the new D-Bus API I
think; but in any case wpa_supplicant 0.7.x has a "light AP mode"
feature that we'd be using for this instead of running full hostapd.

Dan

> Basically I stumbled over a tool called Connectify
> http://connectify.me which makes a real portable hotspot out of your
> laptop such that you can share your internet connection and was under
> the impression that this did not exist in NM. I was pointed out that
> it exists. Only that it is more limited. You can only setup an adhoc
> network and not a full hotspot and you cannot share your wireless
> internet connection in case you just have one wifi card.
> 
> I think having this full hotspot functionality in NM would be a really
> nifty feature.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Jaap
> _______________________________________________
> networkmanager-list mailing list
> networkmanager-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/networkmanager-list