Indonet@ 08/02/10 09:04 pm
Today I'll let you all in on a little secret. Stay quiet about it for me, OK? I'm using "appropriated" internet here (zomg unexpected). Anyway, the practice of "borrowing" a wireless connection is nothing new to me, but doing it for extended periods of time is something of an acquired taste. I'll outline what I've discovered about my local wifi environment.
WARNING: TECHNICAL DETAILS FOLLOW!
There's a wireless network here comprised of 3 (maybe 4, there's one I haven't been able to connect to properly) WAPs (Wireless Access Points). They all run their own DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), DNS (Domain Name System), etc, but are connected to a central network. The details you get from DHCP on these things generally consists of an IP in the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet with a default gateway and DNS server in the 192.168.2.0/24 subnet. Of course this means that you can't access the internet until you mess with the gateway and DNS address... I believe this was an attempt at stopping people from using the internet... I'm not quite sure. That about covers the configuration.
What I did was set up one of my laptops as a gateway, with one interface associated to whichever wireless network has the best signal at the time and one in Master mode (hostap). I set up squid, dnsmasq, transparent redirection of web requests through squid, etc to try to take as much strain off the network I'm "liberating" as possible. It doesn't help. I get maybe 20k/s most of the time. I've seen it jump up to 200k/s at one point, but that only lasted maybe 15 minutes and it was back to a crawl.
As much as it sounds like I'm complaining, I'm not. I quite like this set up, even if I'm not a big fan of the connection I'm on. I've learned about hostap, Master mode, some squid tricks I was ignorant to and a few dnsmasq config options I wasn't aware even existed. Plus I don't have to pay for internet. Can't really beat that.
WARNING: TECHNICAL DETAILS FOLLOW!
There's a wireless network here comprised of 3 (maybe 4, there's one I haven't been able to connect to properly) WAPs (Wireless Access Points). They all run their own DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), DNS (Domain Name System), etc, but are connected to a central network. The details you get from DHCP on these things generally consists of an IP in the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet with a default gateway and DNS server in the 192.168.2.0/24 subnet. Of course this means that you can't access the internet until you mess with the gateway and DNS address... I believe this was an attempt at stopping people from using the internet... I'm not quite sure. That about covers the configuration.
What I did was set up one of my laptops as a gateway, with one interface associated to whichever wireless network has the best signal at the time and one in Master mode (hostap). I set up squid, dnsmasq, transparent redirection of web requests through squid, etc to try to take as much strain off the network I'm "liberating" as possible. It doesn't help. I get maybe 20k/s most of the time. I've seen it jump up to 200k/s at one point, but that only lasted maybe 15 minutes and it was back to a crawl.
As much as it sounds like I'm complaining, I'm not. I quite like this set up, even if I'm not a big fan of the connection I'm on. I've learned about hostap, Master mode, some squid tricks I was ignorant to and a few dnsmasq config options I wasn't aware even existed. Plus I don't have to pay for internet. Can't really beat that.
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