I recently was taking part in a training at a place which had poor cellular reception, no wifi and only one single ethernet connection. Thus we had to the ethernet via wifi. I tried to do just that with my laptop via NetworkManager – and it worked out of the box.

The basic situation is rather common: you have one single network connection, and want to share it to other people or devices via wifi. If you want to do that manually you have to set up the wifi network on your own, including encryption, need to bring up a dhcp server, configure the routing and NATing, and so on. That can take quite some time, and is nothing you want to do during some precious training hours.

Thus I simply tried to bring up a shared wifi via the NetworkManager applet in KDE:



After providing a SSID name and configuring some security credentials the process was already done, and I was notified that the network was set up and ready. It was also shown in the plasma applet besides the ethernet connection:





And that was it already: everyone was able to connect to the network without any problems – and it didn’t even took me a minute to bring it all up. Since I know how much trouble it can be to bring such a connection up manually I was really impressed!

In case you want to give it a try, make sure that your wifi hardware and thus the appropriate driver; do support Access Point (AP) mode which is needed to bring up the wifi. If it says “for some devices only” you have no choice but give it a try.

By the way, in case you wonder about DNS and DHCP: both is done via dnsmasq as a local server, offering both. The DNS queries are forwarded to the DNS servers you got via DHCP from the ethernet connection (or, presumably the one you configured in NetworkManager).

However, I was not able to find any temporary configuration in /run or /var/ which showed the actual DNS servers – I had to call nm-tool to figure that one out:

$ nm-tool - Device: eth0 [Standard-Ethernet] -------------------------------------------- [...] IPv4 Settings: Address: 192.168.3.27 Prefix: 24 (255.255.255.0) Gateway: 192.168.3.1 DNS: 192.168.2.4 DNS: 192.168.2.3

If you know of any other way to find out these information, or even better simply the entire configuration of dnsmasq for that purpose please let me know =)

Besides, while the Plasma applet gave me the option to shut down the shared wifi network, I wasn’t able to bring it up again. There simply is no option in the network overview to fire up again such a network, thus I filled a bug report.

But, besides these two smaller issues, the plasma-nm applet and thus NetworkManager did a great job making sharing networks very easy.