Random story, for your (unlikely) amusement.
I'm in Turkey now visiting my in-laws. For an internet connection,
interestingly, they've actually dropped their wired DSL and have
gotten a 3G usb dongle instead because it's both faster and cheaper
here (!?) and they split their time between two houses, so this way
they only have to pay for one connection. This is great for them, but
it means that only one computer can be on the net at a time, which
sucks when my wife and I come to visit and both want to work all day.
So, I decided to roll up my sleeves and (1) get the USB dongle to work
on my linux laptop, and then (2) re-export the 3G link by turning my
laptop into a wifi access point. After reading some docs, it turned
out I had to configure the AP firmware in my driver and set up dhcp,
nat, and dns for the network I was creating. All no problem, done it
before. But, it turned out my wireless card (iwl-agn driver) doesn't
support AP mode, and I had some dhcp configuration issue, and blah
blah blah... before I knew it I was reading kernel documentation for
the wireless AP API trying to figure out how hard it would be to write
the missing AP support code for the driver. As a second thread, I had
to find the right software to configure and run the 3G dongle, because
there is some random pin you have to use to auth to the device before
you can even set it up to connect, and blah blah blah. This was very
quickly looking like it was going to be a nightmare.
Then, out of curiosity, I clicked on the NetworkManger icon on my
desktop. It had automatically discovered the USB dongle ("Mobile
Broadband DLS Connection"), and when I clicked the connect button, I
got a GUI prompt for the device PIN and then in a few seconds, it had
an IP and was completely working without touching a config file or
even thinking about a device driver. Then, I happened to find ---
also in net manager --- the "Create a new wireless network" button,
which --- in one click! --- created an ad-hoc network[1], and setup an
ip, ip range, dhcp, dns *and* the natting[2]. A quick test from a
windows laptop and everything pretty much worked right out of the box.
I am completely blown away by how far linux has come... it was %)(*@
crazy :-) I mean, I'm used to stability and flexibility, but the
pure ease-of-use is really new to me. Windows doesn't work this
easily (my first attempt at this project was to try to the same thing
with the window vista and windows 7 boxes that are also here...).
Thought I would share,
- Rob
.
[1] For all I know, it auto detected that my wifi card doesn't support
AP mode, and thus didn't prompt me about becoming an AP :-)
[2] Interestingly, all implemented with a single binary,
/usr/sbin/dnsmasq, which configures the nat, and handles the dhcp and
dns transparently.
