Picture this: Alice is going to "some place" and she has her laptop with her. Bob goes to that same place and he too has his laptop with him.

They would like to have the two computers networked, in a wireless fashion.

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How can they do it? They can't change the location and there are no wireless access points near by.

What I'm basically asking is: can two laptops be networked -wirelessly- without the need of a 3rd device? If so, how?

If they need a 3rd device, it obviously has to be a fairly 'portable' (something Alice can carry or whatever); do such devices exist? What are they called?

What if we need to network 3 laptops? N laptops?

And they want to do it without Alice's husband or Bob's wife finding out.

If you had a patch cable (a differently wired Ethernet Cable), you could do it wired.

This might be of some interest for you. Search around for adhoc.

I don't see why not. If I had two laptops, I am sure I would have tried this out by now.

My laptop connects to the rest of my (wired) network through my wireless router, and that's just a little computer running linux (or so it says in the Netgear docs).

Why don't you try it?: Make sure both are on the same subnet, but have different IPs. Maybe turn off your firewalls for testing purposes (You are in some remote location, right?) Can you ping by IP number? If so then you should be able to do anything.

I think this is what the OLPC project is hoping to do - make a "wireless mesh network" (Try googling those terms) of all the local OLPC's so they can communicate with each other, and eventually attach to an internet AP somewhere.

Like I've said.. this has to be done wirelessly.


tredegar: try *what* out? And is Alice supposed to carry her wireless 'battery-powered' router around with her? Also, I don't have two laptops.

Edit: wireless mesh networks seem promising.

Try out connecting two laptops without a router. I don't think you need one for ad-hoc networking. That's the whole point of it.
But you don't have two laptops
Quick! Find Alice!

Which brings me back to my original question: How do I do that? Assume I have two laptops, no wires, no routers, how do I connect them?

Like I said in post #4, with the added proviso that they are both using the same wireless channel (and for testing purposes, I'd disable any wireless encryption).
So, in essence:
- Disable firewalls / encryption ("KISS" for testing purposes)
- Bring up each wireless interface with a common subnet address, and, obviously, a different (static) IP number (as yet, there is no dhcp serer for you to connect to, but this can be arranged later). Make sure both are using the same wireless channel.
- Try a ping IP.NU.MB.ER of Alice's laptop.

If that works (I think it should, but do not have the hardware to test it), then you are off, so tidy up:
- Tell each laptop the name of the other and its IP number (in /etc/hosts)
- Re-enable your firewall, letting in traffic only from Alice's IP
- Re-enable encryption, making sure both are using the same keys.

Sounds like fun, but where's Alice & her laptop?

O.. Now I gets it. Thanks.

Well, I sure hope she's not with that jerk Charlie.

I think it may be a little more complicated. As, I said, I don't have 2 laptops, but I have spent a little time reading about wireless mesh networking. I think you might need to put one of the wireless cards into "AP Mode", and have the other as "Mangaged Mode", and I read that not all wireless chips / cards can be put into "AP Mode", so some research is necessary, but it sounds like a fun project.

For more complex nets there is some software already written to determing best routing eg B.A.T.M.A.N ( https://www.open-mesh.net/ )

When Charlie shows up, Dolores won't be far behind, and you can a wireless mesh party. Enjoy.