Simple Internet Connection Sharing by Wired Ethernet

[ecomoney]

An often requested feature for puppy is to be able to share the internet connection from the puppy computer to another (windows/mac/linux) using a crossover ethernet cable. This is called internet connection sharing under windows.

[Modem]-------->[Puppy PC]-------->[Other PC]

You an download the .pup file here

Just download the .pup and click on it, and follow the onscreen instructions.

In puppy version prior to 4.xx. I believe you will need to re-enable support for .pup files which was dropped in favour of the new .PET format. I dont know how to do a .pet sorry! Im not quite sure how to enable it in puppy 4 either.

troubleshooting...if connection sharing doesnt work, try swapping the two ethernet wires at the back of your computer around, rebooting and trying again.

USEFUL HINT:-

If you need to change a normal "straight-through" ethernet cable into a crossover one that you can use to connect the two computers, simply cut a section of the plastic coating of the cable away to expose the wires underneath. You will need to cut the BLUE and ORANGE wires, plus the striped blue and orange that they are paired with (4 in all). Strip the wires back and reconnect them BLUE to ORANGE and BLUE STRIPED to ORANGE STRIPED. Cover with electricians tape to make perminant.


Technical Details

some time ago we commissioned Gekko to produce a solution for this problem, and have used this whenever we needed it. Please note, I HAVE NO IDEA how this works! It was all pre-packaged for us. Ive basically tweaked the user interface and re-packaged. This feature has been included in the new Ecopup 0.7.3.1 Alpha, but I have decided to release it as a separate .pup for other versions of puppy.

What this will do is basically share a wired ethernet connection from eth0 to eth1 using DHCP. These are hard coded at the moment , but I believe a dialogue box could be programmed to select these from a list. I hope that someone good at coding up user interfaces and/or with some knowledge of networking will be able to refine this package. Internet connection sharing over wireless would be particularly useful.

This is our first post in this section, so please excuse the exceedingly poor coding quality! All improvements gratefully accepted.

[amigo]

I downloaded the pup, but the AppDir seems to be faulty -the AppRun script is empty. Can you check your zip file again?

[ecomoney]

Dont know how that happened. Have refreshed the apprun and the icon for starting internet connection sharing should work now. Thank you for testing Amigo

[amigo]

Seems to be okay now, thanks. I haven't had a chance to test it yet -typically, the AppDir is really crudely made as most of them are in Puppy. It's a shame that Puppy doesn't use the AppDir concept more fully -usually an AppDir should have everything in that same directory. Ah, well, I'll fix it up when I get time.

[ecomoney]

Amigo, thanks for that, I look forward to seeing your work (Ive seen your other stuff). Are you saying there is no reason that the /etc/rc.d/iptables.sh sh /etc/rc.d/broadcast.sh files should be withi the .appdir?

Something that would be really useful is if the the wizard were able to either take or send its feed to a wireless. Lots of people in this area would like to "double up" their internet connections, i.e. to take a wireless connection from their neighbour (with permission!) and pipe it to several computers in their house.


[Modem]---Eth----->[Puppy PC]============Wireless======[Other PC]

or

[Router]==========[Wireless]=============[Puppy PC]------Eth------[Other PC]



There are also many cases where people have had to expend money on expensive wireless a router and a wireless key costing £40 when they could just spend £16 on two usb wireless dongles to share their internet between two computers. This feature has been asked for many times by new posters on the puppy forum.