Tag: Wi-Fi

Links: How To Set Up A Wireless Hotspot (Access Point Mode) That Supports Android In Ubuntu

A wireless hotspot enables a computer to serve as a router over Wi-Fi. Ubuntu lets you easily create a wireless hotspot by using the Network Manager, but it uses an ad hoc network and most Android and Windows Phone devices can’t connect to such networks.
For this reason, I’ve created (in collaboration with Satya) a script called AP-Hotspot that automatically creates an infrastructure (Access Point mode) wireless hotspot in Ubuntu that should work with Android and Windows Phone devices. The script uses hostapd and dnsmasq and it requires Access Point mode support for your wireless card – AP-Hotspot checks for this automatically and won’t run if your wireless card doesn’t support it.

Full article:
How To Set Up A Wireless Hotspot (Access Point Mode) That Supports Android In Ubuntu (Linux A.I)
Alternate location of above article (WebUpd8)

If you don’t feel comfortable running a script, the script is based on these instructions, so if you want you can do it manually:

[GUIDE] Making infrastructure wifi hotspot on ubuntu 12.04/12.10 (xda developers)

How to isolate a second router from the rest of your local network

 

Important
This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared on a blog called The Michigan Telephone Blog, which was written by a friend before he decided to stop blogging. It is reposted with his permission. Comments dated before the year 2013 were originally posted to his blog.

I was recently asked how to solve a particular problem and I came up with what I think is an interesting solution, especially given my overall rather limited knowledge of networking.  The issue was this: In the home in question, they have cable broadband and a router that feeds jacks throughout the house.  For security reasons, the homeowner never installed any kind of wireless networking (even though his primary router supports it, he keeps it turned off).  Also his primary router is down in the basement.

Recently he got his wife a Motorola XOOM table computer and wouldn’t you know, it requires Wi-Fi access to connect to the Internet.  In order to extend the range, and so that he or his wife could easily turn off the Wi-Fi when the XOOM isn’t in use, he bought a second Wi-Fi router and put it upstairs.  Note that this router is connected BEHIND the original router in the basement.  In other words, the sequence of connection is as follows:

Cable Modem —> Basement (Primary) Router —> Upstairs (Wi-Fi) Router —> Tablet Computer

Now, as I said, he is very security conscious.  So the question he asked me is, if someone managed to break into his Wi-Fi, is there a way to set it up so that they could ONLY get to the Internet, and not to any other system on his local network.  I said I didn’t know, but to first try accessing other machines on his network (the ones that had web interfaces, anyway) from the XOOM.  Turned out that he could do so without any problem.  Because the Wi-Fi router used a different network segment from the original (addresses in the 192.168.2.x range, whereas the original router handed out address in the 192.168.0.x range), as far as anything connected to the Wi-Fi router was concerned, anything on the primary router might as well have been on the Internet (please forgive the non-technical explanation, I’m probably missing several technical details here, but that’s the gist of the problem).

I didn’t think it would be a good idea to try to make the Wi-Fi router use the same address space for both WAN and LAN, and while I could assign it a static IP address on the WAN side, it had to be able to reach the router/gateway at 192.168.0.1.  So here is what we did.

On the PRIMARY router, we took a look at the LAN settings and found that its DHCP server was assigning addresses starting at 192.168.0.2.  We changed that to start at 192.168.0.5 (probably could have used 192.168.0.4 in retrospect).

This way, we could change the WAN address of the Wi-Fi router to use a STATIC IP address of 192.168.0.2, and (this is the important part) a NETMASK of 255.255.255.252.

This means that as far as the Wi-Fi router is concerned, there are only four valid IP addresses in the 192.168.0.x range:

192.168.0.0 (not used)
192.168.0.1 (primary router/gateway)
192.168.0.2 (Wi-Fi router)
192.168.0.3 (Reserved for “broadcast” as far as Wi-Fi router is concerned)

One thing to remember is that after changing the DHCP assignment on the PRIMARY router is that computers already using IP address 192.168.0.2 and 192.168.0.3 will not automatically vacate those addresses until their DHCP lease comes up for renewal.  So if you change the second router’s WAN address to 192.168.0.2, it may not actually be able to connect until the computer or device currently on 192.168.0.2 “loses its lease”.  Rebooting the primary router may help, but in some cases you may have to track down the computer with the conflicting address and shut it off, or if you know how, renew its IP address assignment (this can usually be done from within the network settings panel).  Eventually, though, it should work, and at that point you should find that devices connected to the secondary router cannot connect to any addresses in the 192.168.0.x range outside the three mentioned above, which means they won’t be able to “see” anything else on your network that’s been assigned a DHCP address.

This tip falls into the category of “it worked in this particular situation, but I don’t guarantee it will work for you”.  So if you try this, be sure to test to make sure that the other machines on your primary network are actually unreachable from the secondary router.

Now let the comments begin, telling me how there’s a better way to do this, or why it won’t work, or something to that effect…

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