Ok, here is the situation:

My dorm room still doesn't have a 'net connection, so I have been hopping on a friend's wireless router on my laptop. I want to route my desktop to my laptop (using a crossover cable, or a hub - either way, it should work the same) to get out to his wireless router, which is acting as a gateway to the 'net connection.

I'm running Slack 10 on both machines. Just running a proxy program for HTTP isn't enough - I need FTP, SSH, SMTP, POP3, and more.

What you can do, is set up an iptables firewall script. You'll essentially be turning your laptop in to a router. You can buy a cheap switch and plug it in to the ethernet port of your laptop and dhcpd the ethernet port. You'll have to do some research on iptables and the route command. I know I had to.

I'd give you a run down on what I did before, but I totally hosed my slackware server one weekened with an rm -r * command while I was root unknowingly. Just another example of why you shouldn't be running around as the root account.

Anyway, the basic concept is this. You use route to direct traffic back and forth between the wireless interface and the ethernet interface. You set up iptables to filter traffic from the wireless interface to the ethernet interface. HTH

I have the exact same query and would like to know how exactly this can be done...the whole ip tables n firewalls procedure...can i get a step by step run down somewhere...any link available??