On Sat, Apr 19, 2003 at 10:20:20AM -0400, drew cohan wrote: > Does anyone know where I can find information on how to build a wireless > base station from an old laptop using debian? As of right now, I've been > able to setup a 486 laptop with eth0 & eth1, eth0 being wired and eth1 being > a wireless card under debian 3.0r1 with bf2.4 kernel (works well). What I > don't know how to do is to take information from eth0 and pass it onto eth1 > to act as a wireless base station.
If you want the system to act as an access point, i.e., do the 802.11 management functions, then you need to use a Prism card and use the HostAP driver. http://hostap.epitest.fi/ http://packages.debian.org/testing/net/hostap-source.html http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/hostap-source.html If you want the two cards to correspond to two interfaces, then it is probably sufficient to do "echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward" and set up the appropriate routes on the client machines. If you want the two cards to behave like one interface (with a single IP number), that is a "bridge" and you want a kernel with CONFIG_BRIDGE enabled and the bridge-utils. http://bridge.sourceforge.net/faq.html http://packages.debian.org/stable/net/bridge-utils.html http://packages.debian.org/testing/net/bridge-utils.html http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/bridge-utils.html If you want to combine bridging and firewalling, then you need to patch the kernel. http://bridge.sourceforge.net/devel/bridge-nf/ I learned this from the book _802.11 security_. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/80211security/
