Point-to-point wireless connection

akaempf · n00b Joined: 01 Nov 2003 Posts: 17 Location: London

Hello,

I'm trying to get two PCs to connect using wireless without an access point. The Netgear MA521 cards are showing up fine (thanks to ndiswrapper), and I can run iwconfig to set both cards to ad-hoc mode, with essid 'any' (I've also tried a fixed essid with same results). I have used ifconfig to set the machines' different fixed IP addresses (I'm not using DHCP since I need fixed IP addresses for the server on my wired LAN).

Unless I'm missing something, I should be able to ping one machine's IP address from the other, but I get 'Destination host unreachable' on both machines. Do I need to do route to set a gateway? Any other thoughts? This must be a common requirement, but I haven't had any luck searching the forums or google.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Andreas

viperlin · Veteran Joined: 15 Apr 2003 Posts: 1319 Location: UK

ok lets play.

set 2 laptops to an SSID of your choice.
set card to ad-hoc mode
check cards are on same channel (usually channel 11 or 6)

"ifconfig eth0 up" (on both laptops)
"ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.1" (use .2 on the second laptop)

then try pinging :-)

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20588

Moved from Documentation, Tips & Tricks.
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Quis separabit? Quo animo?

akaempf · n00b Joined: 01 Nov 2003 Posts: 17 Location: London

smart · Guru Joined: 19 Nov 2002 Posts: 455

First the bad vibrations...

you should not normally copy in just the output of one machine and say the other is the same plus one. You would not be the first who had a problem just because he missed out one little figure...

Otherwise, wireless setup seems fine though i'm not 100% sure that without translating the frequency and seeing an actual channel verifies them both to be on the same channel. Should read, seeing the same frequency here on both ends does not convince me that they run on the same channel. The difference might be smaller than thir position behind period. Otherwise, normally they should find each other in ad-hoc without that, but heck, try to define a channel for them if you didn't.

On network side though you have one problem for sure, which is using the same network for your wired and wireless connection. Your routing table will have one of these two connections first, and that's what will be it. Use different networks for the two connections.

akaempf · n00b Joined: 01 Nov 2003 Posts: 17 Location: London

Thanks, this was very helpful. I disabled the ethernet connections on both machines and it worked fine.

In summary, here are the commands I ran on both machines to enable a peer-to-peer wireless connection without an access point (after driver had been successfully loaded with ndiswrapper):