Re: using an old laptop as a base station
On Sat, Apr 19, 2003 at 10:20:20AM -0400, drew cohan wrote:
> Does anyone know where I can find information on how to build a wireless
> base station from an old laptop using debian? As of right now, I've been
> able to setup a 486 laptop with eth0 & eth1, eth0 being wired and eth1 being
> a wireless card under debian 3.0r1 with bf2.4 kernel (works well). What I
> don't know how to do is to take information from eth0 and pass it onto eth1
> to act as a wireless base station.
I do this with an old laptop, too. Here are the basics:
1. Configure the laptop as a router, by doing
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
This needs to be in some script that is run whenever the machine boots.
If you build your own kernel, you'll want to go through the
"optimize as router" options.
Note that you'll have to use the wireless LAN in "Ad-Hoc" rather
than "Managed" mode, unless you have a Prism2 card on the laptop and
run the HostAP drivers.
2. Run a DHCP server on the laptop, configured so that it hands
out the laptop's address as the default gateway for your wireless
clients.
3. Set up ipchains/iptables rules to control what comes into
your wired LAN from the airwaves.
There are HOWTO's in the networking section that cover each of these
in more detail.
--
Eric C. Cooper e c c @ c m u . e d u
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