MTS: Wireless-to-wired bridging?

[SoNick Belmont]

Alright, so here's the deal: my college's computer club is having a LAN party and it somehow got into our heads that it would be cool to have a connection to the internet through the network we'll be setting up. Now, this shouldn't be too hard; there is a working access point in the location that we're going to hold the LAN party, so anything with a wireless card can connect to the internets.

The problem? The switch we'll be using kind of...lacks a wireless card. I spoke briefly about this issue with a friend of mine, and he suggested making use of my nearly-unused (...at the moment; as soon as my new PC arrives, though...) Linksys WRT54G router as a bridge to connect our LAN party temporary network to the college's wireless network and thus grant access to the internet for anyone on the LAN.

Now here's the stumbling block: How do I make the router act as a bridge between the two networks? I don't recall seeing any such setting under the configuration, and after just buying a new PC I'd really rather not spend more money on hardware-items.

[Robert]

I don't have an answer for you, but this is an interesting question. I think WRT54G's are never meant to be wireless receivers in the way you want to use it. They were generally only for creating new wireless networks instead from an existing hardwire cable.

[Seph]

Being that it's a Linksys wireless router, you may as well give up.

If you actually want to try, go to the Setup tab and go to Advanced Routing. That has something of interest for you for multiple routers.

[Robert]

I don't think it's "multiple routers" he has a problem with here; he wants the network to start at the antennas of his router instead of the WAN connector.

[Ashuku]

This is sorta what I've been wanting to do with my laptop.

Is it possible to bridge the internet I am receiving wirelessly on my laptop to another device, using the ethernet port?

[Robert]

ashuku said:

This is sorta what I've been wanting to do with my laptop.

Is it possible to bridge the internet I am receiving wirelessly on my laptop to another device, using the ethernet port?

This most definitely yes. The very simplest form is by running a proxy server on your computer. Otherwise look for software that can perform NAT. Some of the best (and probably commercial only?) software will work completely as a software router, with DHCP, NAT, and possibly other services.


Or, of course, Windows XP has "internet connection sharing"

[Sz]

Yeah, internet connection sharing is probably the way to go. Failing that, a proxy server would be the way to go.

Or: wot rob sed

[Ashuku]

68hc11 said:

ashuku said:

This is sorta what I've been wanting to do with my laptop.

Is it possible to bridge the internet I am receiving wirelessly on my laptop to another device, using the ethernet port?

This most definitely yes. The very simplest form is by running a proxy server on your computer. Otherwise look for software that can perform NAT. Some of the best (and probably commercial only?) software will work completely as a software router, with DHCP, NAT, and possibly other services.


Or, of course, Windows XP has "internet connection sharing"

ah, thanks. I wasent sure, I've never really looked into it. I've always wanted to beable to get xbox live in my room, which has no possible way of getting access to the internet in, unless I drill a hole through the floor, or shell out $80 on a wireless adapter.

Thanks.

[Epon]

:E That's gonna kill your bandwidth. Why not have the LAN thinger over, you know, the LAN?

[Sz]

Well, I know that a lot of wireless internet setups (at least here on a University campus) don't take bandwidth into account....


(which is pretty sweet, really.)

[SoNick Belmont]

Alright, I've looked into my issue, and I've come to some preliminary conclusions (oxymorons are fun! ): The WRT54G's firmware is open-source, meaning that there are multiple modified versions available. A "DD-WRT" firmware seems to have the feature that I'm looking for. Now I just need a simple run through of how to use it. I've found quite a few, but they take into account extra steps for WPA encryption and the difficulties associated with getting this to work. This...helps me slightly, but the college's wireless network has no encryption.

The steps for WPA encryption are found here:
www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Client_Bridged

I should only need to change the following, correct?
Wireless > Wireless Security
- Security Mode: WPA Pre-Shared Key
- WPA Algorithms: TKIP
- WPA Shared Key: <equal to the other side>

I'd skip asking and just do it myself, but any attempts will have to wait until tomorrow; I hadn't learned of the DD-WRT firmware prior to today and had planned in getting my Intro to Networking instructor to help me figure out a solution to my problem. He was absent for personal reasons (his father passed away yesterday), and in the mess of figuring out what we're supposed to do and then networked games in the classroom I forgot all about my wireless router. It...it's still sitting in that classroom.


Edit: Ah, Proboards' auto-removal of leading spaces. How I missed running into that.

[Oni Lukos]

sonick said:

Edit: Ah, Proboards' auto-removal of leading spaces. How I missed running into that.

For the LAST TIME. It's NOT PROBOARDS. It's HTML! Hell, it might even be SGML!

www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#h-6.2
Right there! It says:

• Ignore line feeds,
  
• Replace each carriage return or tab with a single space.
  

User agents may ignore leading and trailing white space in CDATA attribute values

I'm putting leading whitespace right here. If you quote it, you'll find it's still there. If you look in the source of the page, you'll see it's still there. OKAY?

...sorry about this, it just really bugs me.

[SoNick Belmont]

Ah, but it's not the fact that HTML removes those that's the problem; I haven't worked with HTML in ages so there's a good chance that there's an even better way to do this [possibly using CSS] than what I'm about to suggest, but couldn't the php forms simply place <p> tags around the posts, thus preserving the original spacing while at the same time allowing the text within the table to wrap correctly? Or am I just that rusty in the ways of HTML?
Thus the comment about it being Proboards' fault (although to be honest, the post looks better with the dashes than it did with leading space).

But on the topic of what I was talking about earlier, I've upgraded the firmware to DD-WRT. Changing the settings with firefox only works about half of the time, which is consistant with what I've read [...what? I'm stubborn and was convinced that I could get it to work], meaning that I must start up IE whenever I want to change settings. In addition, accessing anything at all in IE is suddenly quite slow. I was afraid that this new firmware was causing the router in general to slow down, but switching back to Firefox cleared those fears as everything (including accessing the routers' configuration pages) was back to normal speed.

This means that the IE slowdown has another cause. I'll have to look into it sometime later; it's only a minor annoyance due to not using IE for anything other than accessing that configuration page.

[Oni Lukos]

Actually, probably the best way to solve the problem on Proboard's end would be to use a chain of filters that substitutes trailing, leading and multiple spaces for & s and tabs with & & & & .
However, this isn't that easy. <p> would just separate paragraphs and not preserve whitespace. <pre> preserves whitespace, but doesn't do linebreaks, so that's not good.

...okay, I'll try not to derail this thread any more.