Bridge WiFi to Switch for other devices to connect to? - eviltoast

Hiya, I’ve got a desktop (connected to wifi), and a server (without a networking card), and I do not have access to Ethernet/or the router. However, I do have a networking switch - and was wondering if I could bridge the WiFi from my desktop(Nobara), to the Switch, and have my other devices such as Raspberry Pi and my main server connect to that. If thats possible please let me know how, or point me to some resources, I believe I have to touch iptables in this case, but have never tweaked those before.

This is a very temporary solution for not having access to a router. But gotta live like this for 5 months, so gotta find a solution to get WiFi on my server, as cheap as possible.

  • Markaos@lemmy.one
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    8 months ago

    Do you need other WiFi devices (like a phone or a laptop) to be able to access your servers? If not, you could just set up your desktop as a router, that would be the most painless way to go around this situation.

    The basic steps are to enable IP forwarding on your desktop, configure a static IP address on the Ethernet interface (for example 192.168.1.1/24 - just make sure it is in a different network than what you get from the WiFi. For example if you get 192.168.0.x, the previous example address would be fine), then optionally set up a DHCP server on the Ethernet interface (otherwise you will have to manually give everything a static IP address), and then finally add a masquerade rule into the firewall (something like iptables -A FORWARD -o wlp0s1 -i enp0s1 -m conntrack --ctstate NEW -j ACCEPT; iptables -A FORWARD -m conntrack --ctstate ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT; iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wlp0s1 -j MASQUERADE - the first two rules allow new connections from Ethernet to WiFi and replies in either way, and the final rule sets up the masquerade - it makes it look like all the traffic is coming from your desktop and hides the new network from your WiFi router; it wouldn’t understand how to communicate with this new network otherwise)

    It might sound pretty overwhelming, but it should be manageable if you go step by step.

    • Lunch@lemmy.worldOP
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      8 months ago

      Thanks very much for a detailed response! Will try to dissect this and do this when I get home.

      Have great rest of your day 🙌