How to Turn Your Ubuntu Laptop into a Wireless Access Point

If you have a single wired Internet connection – say, in a hotel room – you can create an ad-hoc wireless network with Ubuntu and share the Internet connection among multiple devices. Ubuntu includes an easy, graphical setup tool.

Unfortunately, there are some limitations. Some devices may not support ad-hoc wireless networks and Ubuntu can only create wireless hotspots with weak WEP encryption, not strong WPA encryption.

Setup

To get started, click the gear icon on the panel and select System Settings.

Select the Network control panel in Ubuntu’s System Settings window. You can also set up a wireless hotspot by clicking the network menu and selecting Edit Network Connections, but that setup process is more complicated.

If you want to share an Internet connection wirelessly, you’ll have to connect to it with a wired connection. You can’t share a Wi-Fi network – when you create a Wi-Fi hotspot, you’ll be disconnected from your current wireless network.

To create a hotspot, select the Wireless network option and click the Use as Hotspot button at the bottom of the window.

You’ll be disconnected from your existing network. You can disable the hotspot later by clicking the Stop Hotspot button in this window or by selecting another wireless network from the network menu on Ubuntu’s panel.

After you click Create Hotspot, you’ll see an notification pop up that indicates your laptop’s wireless radio is now being used as an ad-hoc access point. You should be able to connect from other devices using the default network name – “ubuntu” – and the security key displayed in the Network window. However, you can also click the Options button to customize your wireless hotspot.

From the wireless tab, you can set a custom name for your wireless network using the SSID field. You can also modify other wireless settings from here. The Connect Automatically check box should allow you to use the hotspot as your default wireless network – when you start your computer, Ubuntu will create the hotspot instead of connecting to an existing wireless network.

From the Wireless Security tab, you can change your security key and method. Unfortunately, WPA encryption does not appear to be an option here, so you’ll have to stick with the weaker WEP encryption.

The “Shared to other computers” option on the IPv4 Settings tab tells Ubuntu to share your Internet connection with other computers connected to the hotspot.

Even if you don’t have a wireless Internet connection available to share, you can network computers together and communicate between them – for example, to share files.

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How To Extend Your Wireless Network with Tomato-Powered Routers

If you’re underwhelmed by the reach of your wireless signal, follow along as we show you how to extend your wireless network using routers powered with Tomato firmware.

What You’ll Need

For this tutorial the requirements are quite minimal. You’ll need the following things:

• Two Wi-Fi routers with Tomato aftermarket firmware installed.
• An Ethernet cable (optional).

That’s it! You technically don’t even need the Ethernet cable but we always prefer to do any heavy router tweaking over a wired line (saves you the hassle of having to plug yourself in anyway should something go wrong with the wireless configuration and you lose you Wi-Fi connection to the router).

We won’t be covering the installation of Tomato in this guide (for that you can check out our previous installation guide to get up to speed).

A final note before we proceed. The prior DD-WRT guide we shared with you focuses on using the second DD-WRT powered router as a Wi-Fi repeater. Currently, Tomato (and it’s derivative TomatoUSB) do not include the specific software components necessary for a true Wi-Fi repeating mode. The network extension tool included in Tomato is known as Wireless Distribution System (WDS). If you’re interested in the technical aspects of WDS you can check out this Wikipedia entry here. For our purposes there are only a few key details we need to highlight.

The most important difference between setting up a pure repeater (as per our DD-WRT guide) and setting up a WDS node, is that the WDS suffers a performance hit after the first transmission hop. What this means in practical terms is that if you were, say, transferring a file between a laptop in your bedroom which was connected to your WDS node upstairs (which is then, in turn, connected to your actual router in your office), and then to a network drive connected to that office router, you’d suffer a theoretical performance hit of 1/2 the Wi-Fi transmission speed.

This sounds like an awful compromise, but in reality you likely won’t even notice it. Unless you’re trying to transfer massive files over your network by Wi-Fi (which isn’t very practical to begin with) the potential halving of transmission speed is of no practical impact for simple web browsing and small file transfers–and is far outweighed by the huge signal boost you get from the placement of the secondary node.

Although we’re focused on extending a Wi-Fi network with this guide, it is worth noting that you can use the secondary router (once configured in WDS mode) to plug in wired devices via Ethernet. Thus you could, for example, place the secondary Wi-Fi router near a network-enabled printer or older computer without a Wi-Fi connection and use the secondary router as a sort of Wi-Fi Ethernet bridge.

All that said, if  you find the Wi-Fi performance hit to be unacceptable you can always flash your secondary node with DD-WRT and configure it as a pure repeater.

Getting Started Configuring Your Primary Router and Node

To cut down on confusion we will, henceforth, refer to the router that your internet connection is hooked up to as your Primary Router and the router you’re configuring to be your network extender as your Node. It is very easy to accidentally apply settings to the wrong administrative interface so, despite the relative simplicity of the following instructions, it’s critically important that you make sure you’re applying the settings to the correct side of the equation. Always double check if you’re supposed to be working with the Primary Router or Node.

The following instructions start from the premise that you have two routers, both with Tomato installed, and both plugged in.

First, navigate to the administrative interface of the Node. This is where it is extremely helpful to use the Ethernet cable as, even if the default settings on the Node confliction with the default settings on the Primary Router, your direct wired connection will overrule that.

In the administration panel of the Node, navigate to Administration –> Admin Access –> Color Scheme. Select an alternative color scheme for the Node. The default color scheme for Tomato is, simply, “Tomato”. We changed the color on the Node to “Blue”. It seems trivial but you’re going to spend the next 20 minutes plugging in commands to the two interfaces and something as simple as a different color scheme will decrease the chances you plug in the wrong parameters. Also, for future tweaking, it’ll make it immediately clear which of the devices you’ve logged into. Now would also be a great time to scroll down in that same Admin Access sub-menu and change the access password on the router if you haven’t done so already. Make sure to click Save at the bottom to save your changes.

After you’ve set the color and changed the default password to something more secure, it’s time to begin configuring the Node to serve as a WDS access point. Navigate to Basic –> Network on the Node. We have quite a few settings to toggle in this section, you may wish to print a basic check list so you can check them off as we go (trust us, it’s really frustrating to waste time trouble shooting a network problem only to find out that you forgot to change a 1 to a 2 or something as equally tiny).

Within the Network sub-menu of the Node, you want to work down through the following settings, toggling them as you go. First, toggle the WAN / Internet to Disabled. Second, change the values in the LAN section to the following:

• Router IP Address: 192.168.1.2 (presumes your Primary Router IP is 192.168.1.1)
• Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
• Default Gateway: 192.168.1.1 (the IP of your Primary Router)
• Static DNS: 191.168.1.1. (You may use either your Primary Router IP or your ISP’s DNS server IPs)
• DCHP Server: Unchecked.

In the Wireless section of the Network sub-menu of the Node, configure the following settings:

• Enable Wireless: Checked.
• Wireless Mode: Access Point + WDS
• Wireless Network Mode: G Only
• SSID: The SSID of your Primary Router, i.e. linksys or wireless.
• Broadcast: Checked.
• Channel: The channel of your Primary Router, i.e. 6 – 2.437.
• Security: WPA Personal (this is the strongest method you can use with WDS)
• Encryption: AES
• Shared Key: Enter the Wi-Fi key used by the security settings on your Primary Router.
• Group Key Renewal: 3600
• WDS: Link With…
• MAC Address: In the first slot, insert the Wi-Fi MAC address of your Primary Router.

Make sure to click Save at the bottom to lock in all the changes you just made.

Now it’s time to go into the administrative panel of the Primary Router and finish the connection. Login and navigate to Basic –> Network (just like you did on the Node). In order to cut down on confusion (and the chances of you messing up the already functional configuration of your Primary Router) we’re only going to include the WDS specific changes you need to make. Scroll down in Network to the Wireless section. Toggle the following settings:

• Wireless Mode: Access Point + WDS
• Wireless Network Mode: G Only
• WDS: Link With…
• MAC Address: In the first slot, insert the WI-FI MAC address of your Node.

Note: If you weren’t using WPA Personal/AES and inserted new values for your security/encryption into the Node during the previous step, you need to make sure those settings are mirrored on the Primary Router. Click Save.

At this point, having saved the changed on both the Primary Router and the Node, you should be in business. Plug in the Node at the edge of your current wireless signal (say, upstairs or across your house) and enjoy a much stronger Wi-Fi signal.

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How to Change the Priority of Wireless Networks in Windows 8

One of the noticeable changes in Windows 8 was the exclusion of the Wireless Profile manager that was included in Windows 7. While there are a lot of third-party tools to change the priority of the networks you connect to, we’re going to show you how to do it natively in Windows 8.

How to See the Priority of Your Wireless Networks in Window 8

Sure there is no included GUI, but that’s never stopped us. To see a list of Wireless Networks you have joined and their priority open up an admin command prompt and run the following:

netsh wlan show profiles

How to Change the Priority of Your Wireless Networks in Window 8

So now that we have seen the priority of our wireless networks, you probably want to know how you can alter it. To do this we need a few pieces of information from the previous screenshot, namely the name of our interface, Wi-Fi in my case, and the name of the network we want to adjust the priority of. Once you have all that run the following:

netsh wlan set profileorder name=”w1r3l3$$” interface=”Wi-Fi” priority=1

Just replace w1r3l3$$ with the name of the network and Wi-Fi with the name of your network interface.

Now if I go back and check my profiles you will see that w1r3l3$$ has been bumped up.

That’s all there is to it.

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