Wahoo ! Surfs Up! Of the wireless kind.

Let me start off by catching up where I left. So, I'm back home, been a month now, swarmped by work, but tackling it all with new zest and ethusiasm. Wonders of a vacation.
So I've been watching a lot of movies, listening to a lot of music, and working my ass off. Meanwhile, since I got sick of using a dial up connection, I got myself BSNL's Dataone 256kbps line. I think it rocks coz I invariably get 35-40kbps downstreams. Anyway, dowloading stuff wasnt my intention. I just wanted a fast, always ON internet lifestyle ; )

So, first I got this working on windows, no sweat at all. The router that they give can be configured to dial-up internally [PPPoE] with DHCP and DNS, so all you have to do is power it up and connect the LAN cable. No need to use the WAN miniport driver on Win. Then I thought I should try this on Linux.

A little googling around shows how to setup PPPoE in Linux. Well, you can do it without PPPoE. Here's one of my HOWTO articles : )
My config:
1 really old Toshiba Portege
1 Ethernet pcmcia adapter [ This toshiba didnt come with an inbuilt port]
1 WUSB 54g (802.11g) WiFi adapter
Red Hat 9 , with kernel 2.6.12 .

I just HAD to setup this bband over WiFi !
Of course I had another WiFi client (

On the Toshiba:
ifconfig - a : shows two interfaces

eth0 subet [192.168.1.x]
wlan0 subnet [10.0.0.x]

Most Linux distro's come with dhcp clients, so on the Toshiba I did dhclient eth0 and got a 192.168.1.x IP assigned.

The wlan interface is all yours to configure, so set it up as you like. In my case, the 11g drivers for linux are discontinued , thanks to Connexant for not providing the programmers manual for Prism GT. So anyway, I used ndiswrapper , and installed the WinXP driver for the dongle on linux. Fired it up for Ad-Hoc mode.

On the client side, started Wifi similarly and got associated instantly.
Now that I was through with WiFi, I only had to bridge these two interfaces on the Toshiba.
This can be a bitch, coz it involves iptables. The whole netfilter code in the mainstream kernels has caused several pre-releases since 2.6.11

So anyway, albeit its really powerful, I just wanted to get surfing.
So all I did was, enable IP forwarding,

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

Set up chains in the NAT.
iptables -A FORWARD -i wlan0 -o eth0 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o wlan0 -j ACCEPT

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

and voila !

Surfs Up !

Of course you need to setup various firewalls along with this. I had configured the router firewall, plus if I used WiFi on Windows, I had another firewall burning hot. :)

A really long time since that happened !

I remember back in school days, there were some times (read as many times or even almost everyday :) ) when I'd wake up from bed and just hate the feeling of actually going to school. Starting my day off like that, would rub off on pretty much everything from brushing my teeth , having a bath, breakfast etc etc. I'd just hate it.

Now, its pretty much how I feel ! I just got back from London and what I'm feeling now is just incredible. I stayed at my "favourite" aunts place. "Fav" coz she's too cool, she knows how to cook all cuisines, knows where to shop for stuff, and is really more like a close friend to me. Anyway, when I arrived at her place, she gave me the map of the Underground and said look this is how its going to be. You go on your own, travel by yourself, these are the numbers in case of any emergencies. My mom almost died when she heard all this :p But anyway, all this independence was the main reason why I feel soo different now. I didnt quite realise this while I was alone travelling the streets of London ! Funny that !

So, I was saying, I've enjoyed soo much in the past few days mostly in London, that I dont feel like going back. Alas, another 4 days and I will be on my way back home.

Anekh-dotes

Alright, so was in NewCastle this afternoon, just walking back from this
(the millenium bridge) to grab a bite, waiting for the pedestrian signal to glow green, this chap walks up behind me * brief attempt to be funny here * ... tall, maybe 6'4" , fair, faint beard, not-so-well-dressed, looked much older than me, so I guess he's 18 :) ....says "Excuse me Sir, blah blah blah passport ? " .....this is exactly how I heard it .... So I say "I'm sorry ? you want a passport ? " .... He stoops down a bit and says softly this time " No sir, but do _you_ want one, I want to sell you one ! " .... I'm like "No thanks" ... I turn around coz the signal begins beeping when its green, then I turn back and this dude is already seen accross the street disappearing into the crowd.

Hmm, it happened so quick, it was wierd, but I didnt feel scared, but instead I was amused ! New castle has many of those typical crowded streets around the town centers, and I was told to be careful of such goons. But it really isnt suprising, coz when you enter a town center, there's soo much crowd, if I were a thug, this is the place I'd be :p , so it didnt come as a suprise to me that I'd come across something like this.

A little later, as I was munching on my super meal deal ( a sandwich + free coke) , around the same area, I see this couple, maybe in their early 30s, tatooted right till their faces, a lot of peirced stuff (Im sure they'd drowing if they were to go swimming coz of the holes in them) ... they seemed happy with it. So they were walking in front of me, suddenly turn into this magazine shop and start browsing pRon magazines together. I guess there's nothing wrong in that. But if Obelix was real , he'd say "these Britons are crazy".