Re: using an old laptop as a base station

[Paul Kimoto <kimoto@lightlink.com>]

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.

If you want the system to act as an access point, i.e., do the 802.11
management functions, then you need to use a Prism card and use the HostAP
driver.
  http://hostap.epitest.fi/
  http://packages.debian.org/testing/net/hostap-source.html
  http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/hostap-source.html

If you want the two cards to correspond to two interfaces, then it is
probably sufficient to do "echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward" and set
up the appropriate routes on the client machines.

If you want the two cards to behave like one interface (with a single IP
number), that is a "bridge" and you want a kernel with CONFIG_BRIDGE
enabled and the bridge-utils.
  http://bridge.sourceforge.net/faq.html
  http://packages.debian.org/stable/net/bridge-utils.html
  http://packages.debian.org/testing/net/bridge-utils.html
  http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/bridge-utils.html
If you want to combine bridging and firewalling, then you need to patch the
kernel.
  http://bridge.sourceforge.net/devel/bridge-nf/

I learned this from the book _802.11 security_.
  http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/80211security/