Odds and Ends - WiFi on the road

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Now I have an iPod touch I am very interested to have a wireless connection. Increasingly I am irritated by the practice of hotels (in particular) to charge not only for a connection, but for each device. In Brazil I took two laptops and chose a pay per byte tarriff because a pay per day tarrif would have only worked on one device.

The iPod motiviated me to find a solution, and I was very surprised to find Microsoft have provided the answer in Windows 7 for machines with a certified WiFi driver. In short, any Windows 7 machine (except ones running starter edition) can easily be turned into a full wireless access point (not just establishing an ad-hoc network).

In this posting, I will describe the manual way of setting this up, and then link to software to do this for you.

Doing it by hand

The key to this is Microsoft's addition of a Virtual wifi miniport adapter (thanks to http://bink.nu/news/windows-7-as-an-wifi-accesspoint.aspx for a simple guide).
Step 1 - open a command prompt with administrative rights. This is not simply open a command promp as an administrator - you need to right click on "Command Prompt" (usually found in the accessories folder of the start menu) and choose Run As Administrator.
Step 2 - allow a hosted network with the command

netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=MyNetworkName key=sesamestreet

The ssid and password should be changed

Step 3 - the created network needs to share onward access. I won't explain here but it is covered in Steven Bink's article. You need to choose the outbound connection (e.g wired lan, wireless on the same hardware or a 3G connection)
Step 4 - change the configuration so that the virtual network adapter is limited to using IP. Again I won't explain here but it is covered in Steven Bink's article
Step 5 - turn it on. Again in a command prompt with administrative rights

netsh wlan start hostednetwork

A software utility to help

Now to the software. I am sure there is more, but I chose this OpenSource project:

http://virtualrouter.codeplex.com/

This allows easy setup of the virtual access point and then displays the devices connected.

Some thoughts.
Microsoft have been quite clever - they are able to support connecting devices to the Windows platform, such as Zune and Windows Mobile 7. They have limited the functionality to WPA encrypted networks but are ensuring drivers should be able to support Wi-Fi Direct when it becomes a standard.
See also Errata Security

Mobile working

posted on Saturday, June 12, 2010 8:54:23 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)

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