vaizki | # 1 | 2008-01-30, 04:50 | Report

I travel a lot and hotels are my second home. I run into one of the following situations regularly:
- There is just a lan-cable for access in my room
- There is wireless access but I have to pay $15-$25 to use it and then it's (of course) locked to my laptop MAC address

So I'm stuck with my N810 stranded from the Internet and I'd like to download Maemo mapper maps or do voip calls from it, maybe even listen to some internet radio.. Since my laptop is pretty much always on the hotel network, it should be a simple solution to share the paid-for connection of the laptop..

Well it doesn't seem to be easy. I've googled and searched these forums with no luck. Some of the ideas I have:

- When using wired LAN, configure the laptop wifi into ad hoc mode and run ICS to give the N810 dhcp + natted internet access. Problem is my laptop (IBM) has a quite handy connection management tool that doesn't allow this kind of 2 active interfaces config and disabling it and re-enabling is a horrible hassle. And configuring ad hoc mode just for a quick N810 download session is a painful experience. Plus this is not a general solution (need something different for when the laptop is connected via Wifi)

- When using Wifi internet, just associate the N810 with the same access point and manually configure the laptop as the default gateway. Then make some NAT trickery there.. how that would work in my Win XP laptop - no idea. And yet again not a general solution.

- Use the laptop as a Bluetooth network access point. It seems to support this but for some reason the N810 doesn't seem to? what gives.. this would be THE clean solution. Can I hack this from my N810 xterm? I can't even find hcitool (referenced on some 770 sites about BT hacking) on this thing.

- Use the laptop as a BT dial-up-networking device. My IBM bt stack actually supports this.. as long as I want to dial out with the on-board modem! So no luck here in the laptop simulating a phone with packet data and just terminating the PPP connection instead and doing some ICS magic.

- Ok the rest of my ideas are too wild to list publicly... Some of them include running Linux in a VMWare player and esoteric network configs..

So.. if anyone has any pointers to get me forward I'd appreciate it.

- Vaizki

mooler | # 2 | 2008-01-30, 05:34 | Report

http://www.jiwire.com/wi-fi-travel-r...vel-router.htm

A travel router may be what you are looking for.

votequimby | # 3 | 2008-01-30, 08:24 | Report

My laptop has a flakey wifi connection, so sometimes i set up an SSH connection between my tablet and laptop, with dynamic port forwarding, and access the internet from the laptop through the tablets wifi. Maybe you could try something like this in reverse?

kilroy155 | # 4 | 2008-01-30, 21:01 | Report

There are a couple of other somewhat related threads on this topic that may provide you some useful info:

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ad.php?t=15618

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ad.php?t=12666

I've been trying to get internet access for my N810 via Bluetooth on my laptop based on the information provided in those other threads, but have so far been unsuccessful.

vaizki | # 5 | 2008-01-31, 02:01 | Report

Ok I think Mooler got it in one. That jiwire page pointed me at the Linksys WTR54GS travel router that can simultaneously act as a client on a hotel wifi AND provide a private hotspot to my devices. Now that's a great feature. And of course with cables the usual router magic is there.

They don't sell that model where I come from (Finland) but luckily I'm going to be in the US next weekend so I'll try to pick one up at a best buy or something. I'll post my experiences.

bg4 | # 6 | 2008-02-03, 21:39 | Report

I have two wifi connections on my laptop - second is a Netgear PCMCIA card and was able to connect to my N810 thru my laptop via Sprint Broadband connection and I just successfully connected by sharing the wifi network in my house - thru the laptop (IBM T30) and setting up an adhoc network to the tablet. It can be done. You do need two wifi connections. Using Cell connection and ethernet connection requires only one wifi connection obviously.

Google "make your laptop a hotspot" - There is a video from CNET that is really great in explaining it all. They do not mention wifi sharing but you can kind of figure it out and its not that difficult - One caution as mentioned in the video. With XP you should be comfortable with changing settings - kind of funny being as we use xterm. But at least be careful with changing settings in XP. He calls it getting out of an XP hole.

Thanks to the OP for making me awae that this is possible.

ADDED: If anyone wants the instructions let me know. I made a word doc for my laptop with directions (to myself) for setting this up.

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Last edited by bg4; 2008-02-19 at 17:06.