How to share a wireless connection with others using Ethernet and Fedora
By Osma on Thursday 15 January 2009, 18:40 - Permalink
It took me a bit of time to figure this out, and the Lazyweb wasn't too helpful this time, so a small note: If you have a wired Internet connection you want to share with others using your laptop's wireless adaptor, NetworkManager has a menu item for "Create a new wireless network". That's pretty obvious to find. However, if you want to do vice versa, and share a wireless Internet connection with someone connected over the wired Ethernet (or many people, if you have a small switch to share), the procedure is simple, but more hidden.
- Right click on the NetworkManager status icon to open the settings menu and choose "Edit Connections"
- Click on "Add" on the Wired tab. Yes, you can have multiple connection profiles set up even if you only have one Ethernet port.
- Choose the "IPv4 Settings" tab for the new connection and change the Method selection to "Shared to other computers".
- Name the connection in a way that makes sense to you (I chose to call it "Shared Ethernet"), click Apply.
- Connect the other computer or switch with an Ethernet cable, and choose the just-created connection profile as the active one from the NetworkManager connection menu. You're done.
When you're using the Ethernet port for a regular LAN link, just choose the original network profile instead (mine's called "System eth0"). That profile probably is the one that is used automatically, so if you make this new one not automatic, you'll just have to choose it when you want to share an Internet link and plug in to something.
Now, if I could just figure out how to do the same with Mac OS X and/or Windows as well, it'd be simpler to chain to a colleague's machine and share a single wireless link instead of paying 20€ a day per computer for a conference room wireless.. Unfortunately, they make this same operation even more difficult to find and make work.
Comments
11-step instructions for Windows: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/...
and 6-step instruction for Mac: http://theappleblog.com/2008/05/22/...
On Ubuntu 8.10, this guide works as well, but only after you install the package dnsmasq-base before starting the newly created wired connection profile. I discovered in /var/log/syslog that NetworkManager was complaining that the dnsmasq library was missing.
I use it to share the 3G (with a Huawei E220 USB modem) to my wired LAN.