I have a wireless router at home which is physically far from the place I actually work. I required an internet connection to update my Arch machine. I could use wpa_supplicant to connect to internet using wifi but I thought I would explore the option of connecting my laptop back to back with another that already had a wifi connection.

Let’s call the computer with wifi connected to the router as I (as in connected to Internet). Let’s call the other computer C.

1. Connect I and C using normal ethernet cable. You don’t really need a cross-over cable since most ethernet cards these days are smart enough to do automatic cross-over.

2. Select a IP range for the ethernet connection between I and C. I chose 192.168.10.x.

3. On computer I, set the ip : sudo ip addr add 192.168.10.1/24 dev eth0

4. On computer I, Enable ip forwarding and setup iptables to masquerate (nat) the wifi connection.

sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wlan0 -j MASQUERADE


5. On Computer I, install and configure dnsmasq. dnsmasq is a dhcp and dns server. The only configuration I needed after installing dnsmasq was adding a line “dhcp-range=192.168.10.100,192.168.10.150,12h” in /etc/dnsmasq.conf. That line specifes the ip range for dhcp leased addresses and the validity time. dns support is enabled by default, so nothing to configure there.

6. Run dnsmasq. Just “sudo dnsmasq”. I actually used “dnsmasq –no-daemon” which lets me the see the debug output on the console.

That’s it. Computer C should not get an IP address and be able to access the internet. You can use ‘dhclient eth0′ or ‘dhcpcd eth0′ to get an IP address through DHCP.