Fixed IP on my work laptop :-(
 

Hi,

I have a wireless LAN at home using the 192.168.x.x private address range. My Linux box is providing storage, print and internet access as well as DHCP, DNS e-mail etc.

So far so good, except I have been given a laptop from work which is locked down with a fixed IP address on the wireless card. I'd like to use it wireless at home (I have to plug it in at the moment!) so...

How do I add a second IP to my Linux box and get it to provide all the same services (except, naturally, DHCP) on the second network number? I can use the same address as the default gateway at work (or the DNS server, although I would like to put both addresses on the interface).

Many thanks,

Paul

This can be achieved with a profile management but I never done this. Maybe others may help.

Haha, I cheated and beat the same problem.
 

My work laptop is also locked down with afixed IP address to the wireless card. I cheated and bought a cheap 802.11b router for $13 from geeks.com and hooked it to a port on my box.

I assigned the router a fixed WAN ip address to fit my server range and defined that port on the server to be a DMZ port. Then I just made the router address my laptop direclty with MAC addressing and the problem was solved in less the 10 minutes.

I know I didn't learn anything new about my server that way, but at least I was able to get my laptop up and running wireless quickly. I just felt my time was worth more in this case than the $13 I spent on the cheaters way out. Besides, I didn't really want to screw up the server a friend of mine set up for me until I get a better handle on this Samba stuff I'm playing with.

InkyGhost

An interesting solution that I may well have to try.... I only really have two problems (sorry to be negative!) with that method:

1. I already have a wireless network set up for other machines at home, so I'd have to duplicate it all and make sure the laptop connects to the correct one (doable, but a pain!)
2. DNS. The fixed address assigned by work is an internal DNS server, so won't work with my DNS at home. So I will still need to put a second address onto the box and tell it to serve DNS on that address. Unless, of course, I can get the router to do reverse NAT on the port, but that is getting both complicated and, I suspect, expensive!

BTW, someone, elsewhere, suggested changing the address range I use at home to match work. I could do this, but it would involve an awful lot of configuration and also may cause problems as work is using a public address space (privately, can you believe!) Also, like you, I don't want to risk breaking SAMBA etc (which took AGES to get working right - particularly printing!) with the knock-on implications for my marriage!!!!

Thanks,

Paul

If you have root privileges on your work computer you could assign a new IP address and gateway with ifconfig and route. The DNS is going to be a bit trickier, but I think you could add your ISP's nameservers to /etc/resolv.conf and leave the work DNS in there as well. That is probably going to cause a lag when you surf, but I'm not sure there is a way around that without removing your work DNS entry.

Thanks Hangodog, but unfortunately, Linux doesn't become involved on the laptop, only the server. The laptop is M$ Windoze!

I cannot alter the config of the laptop at all. It doesn't use DHCP for a very good reason, which I can accept.

All I need is for the Linux box to appear, to the laptop, to be the same as the work network.

You could just add an alias to your linux box on the network card - ie:
ifconfig eth0:1 192.168.100.1 netmask 255.255.255.0