Connecting geeks

Surfing Internet without a wireless access point

November 18th, 2005

What if you have your laptop, your gadget and only Ethernet (cable) connection?

Then you need brick-to-brick web surfing!

We will show you how to set up your laptop as a wireless router (if it has a wireless card, of course), and how to set up the Nokia 770 to use this connection.

Gain root on your laptop, and set up an ad-hoc network, as we saw in the last post


root@laptop# iwconfig eth1 mode ad-hoc essid 'bricktobrick' channel 7
root@laptop# ifconfig eth1 10.0.0.1

Now, you must only forward all the traffic to the ethernet card, with iptables


root@laptop# iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -s 10.0.0.2 -j MASQUERADE

Where 10.0.0.2 is the IP of the Nokia 770, eth1 is the laptop’s wireless interface, and eth0 is the laptop’s ethernet interface.

Now only set this connection in the Nokia 770, with 10.0.0.01 as router, and the right DNS address (use the same than your laptop).

If your laptop is connected to the Internet with the ethernet card, you should be able now to surf the web, listen to the radio, etc, with your gadget.

So if don’t have a wireless router, and your girlfriend is talking with her friends with Messenger with the laptop, you can still read the web and check your e-mail with your gadget

15 Comments Add your own

1. Nokia 770 :: Surfing wire&hellip | November 18th, 2005 at 11:45 am

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2. Dominique Bonte | November 18th, 2005 at 1:00 pm

Very interesting! I’m not very familiar with linux (yet), but I wonder if a similar technique could be applied to get access to the local files on the laptop or desktop (the kind of functionality you would get in a windows home network).
3. Alan Wallcraft | November 18th, 2005 at 1:19 pm

If you want to leave your laptop at home, a wireless travel router ($50-$100) is designed for this task and is much smaller/lighter than a laptop. For reviews, see http://mobileoffice.about.com/od/laptopaccessories/tp/pocketrouters.htm
4. Heikki | November 19th, 2005 at 1:00 am

Can someone help me with XP SP2 ?

I was able to create Ad-hoc connection between Nokia 770 and laptop. I was able to access my webserver running on laptop via Nokia 770.

All outgoing connection was droped by XP SP2. I checked firewall logs. So What route should I add or what should I do. I allready put connection sharing … and so on … no help …

Is there more manual ways to configure XP SP2 … to shere it’s Ineternet connection to WLAN connections … TO make WLAN access point out of laptop … Any soft ? Any manuals …
5. plamen | November 19th, 2005 at 3:33 am

how about this: i have a laptop, permanently connected to the internet, and a bluetooth usb adapter i use to connect to my mobile phone. can i set up a bluetooth network that will connect a nokia 770 to the internet through the laptop? this will be great, since i share the laptop with my wife and daughter and there is always fight who’s gonna get to the chair first
6. Andy | November 19th, 2005 at 7:00 am

When I’m at work I use create a peer to peer wireless connection between my laptop and the 770 and then you have to bridge the LAN connection and the wireless connection (CTRL & click both LAN and wireless connections in network settings and right click and select bridge) so that the 770 can see the internet via the LAN.
7. Avi Flax | November 19th, 2005 at 6:32 pm

Nice tip - I personally do this with either an Apple Airport Express or PowerBook. Easier for people with less tech expertise.
8. Tor | November 21st, 2005 at 2:12 am

As for the XP SP2 and the Bluetooth comments - here is a link to a web page that should answer both questions. I have successfully used the information there to set up internet access through BlueTooth for a Palm+laptop on Windows (and on Linux too, only looking at the Palm part).
http://www.whizoo.com/bt_setup/
The person having trouble with outgoing connections should look specifically at the parts where Network Acess/Internet Connection Sharing is explained, particularly looking for that tickbox which says something like ‘Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection’. Just substitute where it says BT with your Wi-Fi card.
9. Teemu Harju | November 22nd, 2005 at 12:56 am

Does anyone know a way to route this adhoc WLAN connection to my Internet interface without this the “bridging” or “internet connection sharing”? ICS forces me to use the 192.168.0.1 IP and I don’t want that. Also this bridging doesn’t seem to work for me.

There is this “route” command in Windows as well. Does anyone have a hint about how it works? Thanks…
10. herraiz | November 22nd, 2005 at 7:07 am

#2: You can use SSH to pass files from/to your computer or gadget. But if need something more, you can use your compute as a NFS server and your Nokia 770 as NFS client. More instructions at http://vidar.gimp.org/n770/slackware.phpx

#3: Ok. Thank you for the recommendation, but I tried to solve my particular problem: I have a wired connection at home, and a laptop, and I preferf to setup the laptop as a router, rather than to buy a new one . Anyway, thanks again.

#4: Sorry, I am not a Windows user.

#5: Take a look at this.

#7: Yes, you are right. It is not so easy with linux, but although so difficult

#9: Sorry, I do not know any other method. Anyway, there is no problem, you can use any IP range for the wireless connection (not only 192.168.0.1, but also 192.168.7.1, 10.0.0.1, 10.0.3.1, 10.0.0.143, etc etc,; that is, if you use a private IP range is enough). And you can use any other range IP in the wired connection (of course, wired and wireless connections must have differente ranges).

Rest of #: Thanks for your comments .
11. Martin Ebourne | January 11th, 2006 at 6:36 am

If trying to use the forwarding above then you may also need the following on the Linux laptop:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

This enables forwarding, which is probably disabled by default. Until forwarding is enabled the iptables line won’t even be used.
12. herraiz | January 11th, 2006 at 7:02 am

Yes, you are right. Thanks!

I forgot to include that.
13. Texrat | September 5th, 2006 at 12:11 pm

I’m looking for a how to on this when the laptop is running Windows XP and gets a dynamic IP via DHCP. I tried using Internet Connection Sharing and telling the 770 to use the network name I created, but the 770 was unable to retrieve an IP address. I’m assuming ICS is supposed to use the laptop’s WiFi connection, right?

I also created a bridge between the laptop’s WiFi and LAN, but after that I could no longer access the Internet on the laptop… help, anyone?
14. Ochipepe | December 2nd, 2006 at 11:50 am

To those that do not manage to connect their nokia 770 to the laptop, here are some further instructions that may be helpfull (bear in mind that I have a laptop connected by Ethernet and configured via DHCP)

- I followed Isra instructions, plus Martin’s tip (11), although I don’t know if it’s required.

- to identify your DNS, use
cat /etc/resolv.conf

- In nokia770 network configuration advanced menu, add the following parameters:

IP 10.0.0.2
Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
Router: 10.0.0.01

DNS 1 and 2: whatever you found out with “cat /etc/resolv.conf”

Note 1: if the laptop was configured to connect to a WEP encrypted wifi network, it will ask for the key, unless you reconfigure it. If you don’t remember it, just type
iwconfig

Note 2: I found the info required to bridge the gaps in the tutorial with these refs: to know what to put in the subnet maks field, the part about the DNS fields.
Thanks a lot to Isra, now I can play with my nokia770 without having to buy a router!
15. herraiz | December 2nd, 2006 at 1:59 pm

Thanks for the additions to the howto!