New Fun Blog – Scott Bilas

[I’m writing this for my own notes so I can look this up easy later.]

So I purchase a 24-hour wifi plan with an internet provider for an outrageous price. And they lock to MAC address or cookies or some other mechanism to ensure that only one laptop works on it at a time. Yet you’ve got an iPod and a PSP and maybe your wife’s notebook too, and you want them all to share your overpriced connection.

Luckily you happen to have a portable wifi router of your own. I happen to carry a D-Link DWL-G730AP. It’s a primitive little thing but is super tiny and USB-powered so I take it everywhere with me, along with a Zip-Linq retractable cat6 cable.

Sharing the network is easy. On your laptop:

1. Hook up to your paid wifi account however they make you do it. My current one insists on a goofy login then clicking a javascript popup window thing (that I can’t close or it drops) to start a countdown.
2. Go to a command shell and type “ipconfig /all” to get your DNS settings for the ISP you’re using.
3. Go to your network and sharing center.
4. Select your wifi connection, go to properties, sharing tab, and enable sharing. Ok ok ok ok.
5. Select your LAN connection, go to properties, TCPIP4 properties, and configure an ip=192.168.1.1 and subnet=255.255.255.0. Ok ok ok ok.

On your wifi router:

1. Set the DWL to Router mode (switch on back) and plug it in to both the USB for power and the network for routing (using the cat6).
2. Hook up to it via wifi on your laptop or other device (ssid=dlink, username=admin, password=blank by default).
3. Config “Wireless” settings to be more secure (WPA, different ssid, etc.) and reboot it/
4. At this point you can start connecting all your devices to your DWL.
5. Reconnect and config “WAN” settings to: static, ip=192.168.1.30, subnet=255.255.255.0, gateway=192.168.1.1
6. Set the DNS entries to the ISP’s settings you got from step 2 on your laptop.
7. Save and reboot the router.
8. Make sure your laptop is connected back to your paid wifi account. I used my iPod to set up my DWL so I didn’t need to do this step.

Your devices reconnect to your router as it comes back up. Then the router should be sharing packets through your laptop! Fun stuff.