From Fedora Project Wiki

Connection Sharing

Summary

Connection sharing allows to easily set up an ad-hoc wireless network on a machine with a network connection and a spare wireless card. If the machine has another, wired network connection, routing is set up so that devices connected to the ad-hoc network can share the connection to the outside network.

Owner

  • Name: DanWilliams

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 10
  • Last updated: 2008-07-16
  • Percentage of completion: 100%

Detailed Description

nm-applet has had a "Create New Wireless Network" menuitem for a long time, but it has never been functional. This feature is about making it work.

When you create a new network, you have to specify the name of the network and what kind of wireless security to use, then NetworkManager sets up the wireless card to work as an access point that others can connect to. The routing will be set up between the new network and the other network connection, and dhcp is used for assigning ip addresses on the new network.

Benefit to Fedora

Connection sharing is very useful in any place where you find many networks and only a limited number of network connections, such as conferences.

Scope

This feature requires changes to nm-applet and maybe NetworkManager.

Test Plan

Have two laptops, one with a network connection and a spare wireless card, and another one. Set up a shared connection on the first laptop, and verify that you can connect to it from the other laptop, and browse the web.

Repeat this test with different wireless security settings, and also with different operating systems on the second laptop.

User Experience

A user on a machine with a wired network connection and a wireless network card can use the "Create New Wireless Network" dialog in the NetworkManager applet to create an ad-hoc network. To do so he needs to pick the Network Name, the security protocol to use and necessary further parameters depending on the chosen security protocol.

A user on another machine with a wireless network card can then use the NetworkManager applet to connect to the newly created ad-hoc network (it should show up in the menu after a while). Depending on the chosen security protocol, he may need the ESSID or some other parameters.

Once the connection is established, the other machine has access to the internet.

Dependencies

None.

Contingency Plan

Leave the existing Connection Sharing UI in nm-applet nonfunctional or remove it.

Documentation

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ConnectionSharing

Release Notes

Fedora 10 introduces connection sharing support in NetworkManager.

Comments and Discussion

See Talk:Features/ConnectionSharing