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Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Plasma NM: connection sharing

Now that the ad-hoc wireless bug has been fixed it is possible to share wired or 3G connection through wireless. To create a shared connection:

  1. Create an ad-hoc connection:
  2. Click on the connection in Plasma NM window and wait.
  3. This dialog will appear, just fill in the passphrase and click Ok:
  4. Wait some seconds and the ad-hoc AP will be started:

I was able to browse the web using my cell phone. The WirelessSharing connection did not appear when I scanned the neighborhood, I had to write the essid manually. Using my current notebook as gateway I was able to connect my old notebook to the Internet too.

9 comments:

R. said...

You rock!! Thanks to Ilia Kats also.
Will test it out today itself :-)

Anonymous said...

Now this is some great news for wifi sharing and KDE4.

Any chance of work being done for Plasma NM to support Lan bridging so users could create bridges in a gui for local kvm virtual machines in KDE4 :)

Anonymous said...

Nice. Does it work with WPA?

Anonymous said...

Actually I'm not sure what the state of netcf support is in NM yet.

Even tho Virt-Manager supports bridging for VM's now, its a far cry from having a central Plasma-NM point for managing bridge connections.

Would love to see these Fedora items completed tho for KDE4 :)

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Shared_Network_Interface

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NetworkManagerBridging

Anonymous said...

Will this be available in KDE 4.6.2?

Anonymous said...

Since NetworkManager does not allow bridging (yet), it's quite unlikely that KDE has this in its frontend.

I'm sure you're not talking about bridging here. Bridging works on the data link layer while what you're referring to is routing, which works at the network layer.

And yes, that's a big difference.

Anonymous said...

"I'm sure you're not talking about bridging here. Bridging works on the data link layer while what you're referring to is routing, which works at the network layer."

I am talking about a bridge and there is no routing involved. I wish to be able to create virtual tap devices in plasma-nm then bridge the tap device with a physical device. This then gives you the ability to use the virtual device for vm's, vpns, etc.

This also gives me a central location to manage both physical and virtual networks in my desktop without resorting to hacking up interface files or disabling NM for a device for certain purposes.

Lamarque said...

@Anonymous3, ok, you are right. Connection sharing in NetworkManager is NAT (Network Address Translation), not bridging. Changing the post title to "connection sharing".

@Killsudo, Plasma NM uses what NetworkManager and ModemManager supports. As far as I know NM does not support bridging, so neither do us.

@Anonymous1, no. To support WPA we need to use hostap, which complicates the configuration. I think NM also does not support using hostap for WPA.

@Anonymous2, Plasma NM does not follow KDE SC release schedule. I tested this code yesterday with KDE 4.4.4 and it worked. It is just a matter of distributions updating their packages with this code.

Anonymous said...

Since WPA is not supported, could you disable that choice in the UI? In the past I have wasted hours trying to figure out why WPA bridging did not work.