My brother came to Xiamen for a few days. His laptop and my desktop needed to share a single Internet connection. The laptop had a combo wireless adapter, and mine had a USB wireless adapter. With no access point in the house, we decided to try ad-hoc mode.
First, I tried using Windows 2000 as the gateway. The wireless link between the two machines came up fine, but the laptop could not reach the Internet — neither NAT nor direct routing worked. In the end, the laptop had to surf the web through a proxy, which was far from ideal.
Then I switched my desktop over to Linux. I simply installed the driver for the USB adapter and enabled IP forwarding. The laptop connected to the Internet immediately — no proxies, no workarounds.
- The USB wireless adapter is a Linksys WUSB-11 v2.6.
- The Linux driver is Atmel AT76C503A-based Wireless Devices.