I have a typical home lan with an ADSL router on it. All of the machines on the LAN have static IPs of 10.0.0.x

I have a USB 802.11b adapter that I've put onto one of my Linux boxes. Having compiled the drivers and loaded them all up, I now have myself a wlan0 interface as well as eth0 on that box.

I would like that box to provide internet access for my windows laptop. On the laptop the netgear utility says it has picked up the wireless network and is connected to it in Ad-Hoc mode.

So my question is this... what now?? The laptop can see the Linux wireless connection but how can I route packets through it to get onto the internet?

Many thanks.

If the laptop is able to ping the interface that the modem is attached to you should be able to just set the laptop to use a gateway with the address of that interface and statically assign the DNS server addresses.

The laptop is picking up the networks ESSID but I can't ping it.

Any idea why?

Its definately my network, - I'm on a farm in the middle of nowhere with a funny ESSID name, and both cards are unencrypted.

you don't seem to be routing between the two connections. routed is generally what you need to do this though Im not sure what special options are needed to configure the wireless side.

You might have to set an option to provide dhcp (dhcpd) or other IP settings - see routed manpage for starters and also the wireless configuration might have a hint about what to do (or a GUI that can do this for you).

I don't use any DHCP on this network, never saw the need.

The Linux machines wireless interface is statically set to 192.168.0.1.

Are you saying that I need to use some kind of routing daemon, - I was under the impression that by using the route command Linux could route stuff anyway?

A little confused now..

Well, I agree with your thinking you don't need it... I mean only 1 or so laptops (thinking for the future) but remember that your laptop will want to hit the internet sites so DNS issues come up. DHCP will handle the DNS issues and doesnt take up much resource. If you have dedicated ISP DNS & router (gateway) servers try adding them to the laptop but your ISP probably gives you a NAT DHCP connection so just routing to the laptop with a fixed address isnt going to work - or work for long. Also your home router is likely using DHCP/ NAT.
Setting up DHCP isn't too hard for most distributions you usually just have to turn it on and tell it about the network.


http://cc.uoregon.edu/cnews/fall1999/moredsl.html (about dsl w/ nat - basic)

These links should be the most helpful:

http://martybugs.net/wireless/router.cgi
http://martybugs.net/wireless/router.cgi

traceroute and netstat commands can also help resolve the routing issues and make things clearer.