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Tutorial/ Ad Hoc Wifi/ Windows 10 And LL/ Administrative File Access

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Tutorial/ Ad Hoc Wifi/ Windows 10 And LL/ Administrative File Access
« Reply #1 on: August 30, 2016, 11:02:28 PM »
 

trinidad

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Tutorial/ Ad Hoc Wifi For Windows 10 And Linux Lite With Administrative Access File Sharing

          *Read important note – (There is a considerable amount of information on this subject available on the Internet, and most of it is either incomplete, flawed, dated, or just plain confusing. Best to ignore it all even at MS sites, and follow this tutorial exactly. Once everything is working you can create some shortcuts and make additions to simplify things.)

          Using an ad hoc wifi connection rather than infrastructure mode has some security advantages for small private networking, most notably the air gap principal, because such connections in almost all cases have only a range of thirty to sixty feet. The biggest disadvantage is that they do not scale well, usually only functioning well as connections between two devices at a time, as adding a third device becomes too resource heavy for most SBD system hosts, not to mention localized radio interference problems. In all honesty, adding a short range second router to your home or small office network is a better, easier, and more fully featured solution, which will allow you set up your private network in infrastructure mode without running through your broadband providers router and modem. Not all NIC’s support ad hoc wifi though support is good for Broadcom, and reasonably there for Atheros, that I am aware of at this time. Linux wifi support is always adding new NIC support, so you may want to check. The first link below has current information on the general state of wifi in Linux, and about everything currently available you would ever want to read on the subject. The second link is a simple explanation of the differences between ad hoc and infrastructure mode from the howtogeek.

https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/

http://www.howtogeek.com/180649/htg-explains-whats-the-difference-between-ad-hoc-and-infrastructure-mode/

          To begin, staying within our clicker GUI friendly philosophy, we are going to install a simple little Linux radio network signal monitoring application to our Linux Lite 3.0 laptop. Click >Menu>System>Install/Remove Software to open up Synaptic. Set to >All in the left menu and then type – linssid into the search box. Mark the package for installation and agree to any dependencies and LinSSID will install. After installation click >Menu>Internet>LinSSID and authenticate when prompted, and LinSSID will load. In the window that appears click the >paused button and the application will begin scanning. Click on the 2.4 GHz tab and color coded signal strength and time graphs will appear for all locally accessible wifi networks. You can obtain SSIDs, MACs, Channels, type of Privacy, WPA,WEP, etc., Cipher, Signal, and Protocol information. We will use this to confirm the ad hoc broadcast signal from the hosted network on our Windows 10 computer.

Configuring ad hoc wifi in Windows 10

          The first thing we need to do is check to see if the drivers are there for ad hoc wifi on our Windows 10 computer. Since Windows 7 configuring ad hoc wifi has been disallowed from the GUI. As I chuckle a little at the irony of having to break my promise for a GUI clicker friendly solution because of Windows 10 rather than Linux, we still can enable a relatively quick solution via the Windows 10 command terminal.
         
          If you are not already, log into Windows with the same administrative account we used to configure RDP from Windows, and file sharing in our past tutorials. Open the Windows command prompt terminal by clicking >Start>All Apps>Windows System>Command Prompt. A terminal should appear reading at the prompt – c: users/ “the user name of the administrative account you are logged in with”/ followed by a flashing cursor. We are going to search for ad hoc network drivers. Type carefully at the command prompt – netsh wlan show drivers – and then hit >enter.

          A list of drivers should appear. Somewhere around the eleventh line in the list an entry should appear reading – Hosted network supported : Yes. If the entry is not there, you do not have the drivers installed, or your machine NIC does not support ad hoc connections. If the entry does appear now type carefully – netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=”whatever you want to name your network”  key=”a password of eight or more characters you choose” and hit >enter again.
         
          A message should appear with a three item list as follows here.  - The hosted network mode has been set to allow.  - The ssid of the hosted network has been successfully changed. - The user key passphrase of the hosted network has been successfully changed. Now carefully type in – netsh wlan start hostednetwork - and your network should start. A message should appear reading as follows. The hosted network started. Yippee! Maybe.

          Now return to your Linux Lite 3.0 laptop and observe LinSSID for any new wifi networks named with the name you just gave yours in Windows. Give it a few minutes. It should appear in the 2.4 GHZ tab, because we began with broadband initially, and be on channel 1 with WPA2 privacy and AES cipher. If it shows up congratulate yourself for using a Windows administrative terminal and not destroying your NIC. The signal will be stronger the closer the two computers are to each other, but quite adequate at twenty feet or so.

          *Read this important note - (We are not going to enable Internet provider access wifi sharing which can be done on the Dell, only because I have wifi here broad enough to cover about two blocks, and everything I own can connect to it, but it is possible to share wifi Internet access in this way if the router/modem is connected via ethernet cable. It’s just not something I need, and the current ethernet connection is shared by my home blu ray players, and wifi and LTE accessible home camera systems already. The method we are using is easier on Windows resources however, but you will have to stop your hostednetwork server from the command prompt -netsh wlan stop hostednetwork - and re-enable DHCP in Windows again for your regular wifi Internet access provider connection afterwards when you are done using your Windows 10 hosted network. Inconvenient, but an internal Windows 10 quality we can do nothing about because it is linked to their so called troubleshooting applications. And when you want to use the hostednetwork server again you will have to use the command – netsh wlan start hostednetwork – to start it. If you use Windows Desktop icons you can place a shortcut for this on the desktop that will work for starting hostednetwork again. Ah, Windows 10 brilliance at work again.)

          We know our new network is broadcasting now, so we need to discover its IPv4 address. With Windows hostednetwork the numbers sets will be common across most machines. Return to you Windows computer and click >Start>Settings>Network & Internet, scroll to and click >Change adapter settings. From the list of networks find the one with the name you just gave it and click on it. Click the button above >View status of this connection. From the window that opens click >details… Write down the IPv4 auto-configured address for later reference (i/e should be something like 169.254.231.0-100)  then click >Close, and then click >Close again, and exit >Settings.

          Return to your Linux Lite 3.0 laptop. We can close LinSSID now. Click the >button now described as >scanning… to pause the scan process. Click >File from the window menu, then from the drop down menu click >exit. Now click >Menu>System>System Information, scroll down and click >Network>IP connections. Leave this window open running in the background or on another desktop. We will use it to confirm our connection. At this point patience should become our watchword, because some of the file sharing protocols will at first be slow on the Windows side, much like the first time we set up samba, because our ad hoc network connection is new to our Windows box. We are all definitely a little spoiled with Linux Lite 3.0 and its speed.

          Because our new network is AES cipher, and WPA2 we cannot use the Linux ad hoc protocol to connect to it with Linux Lite because WPA2 has no easily and/or reliably configured support in Linux ad hoc wifi, allowing only WEP which is deprecated. (I usually use none when connecting two Linux computers via ad hoc) We must treat our new Windows hosted network connection much like a broadband provider Internet wifi connection in our Linux network manager. The easiest way to do so requires manual IPv4 addressing with Windows client/server numbering protocols. Our Windows file sharing protocols should already be correct for us in the Windows 10 Homegroup we previously configured, but now must find their way to the new hosted network so there may be a delay when opening files from the server with Thunar the first time.

          Now on your Linux Lite laptop click on the >wifi icon in the system tray and click the new network to connect. Let it go through the whole process, enter a password when prompted etc. and let it not connect, because it won’t. Click on the >wifi icon in the tray again, and scroll to and click >edit connections. Highlight the now listed new network and click >edit. Click on the >General tab and uncheck the box >automatically connect to this network when it is available. Check the box >all users may connect to this network. Uncheck the box >automatically connect to a vpn when using this connection. Leave the firewall zone set to >default. Now click the tab >wifi. Mode should be >client and MTU should be >automatic. Now click the tab >wifi security. Security should be >WPA & WPA2 Personal. Check the >show password box, and make sure the password of your new network is correctly entered, or if it’s not there type it in.

          Now click the >IPv4 tab and from the Method menu select >Manual. Click the >Add button to the right of the address and type the following address >169.254.231.0 (the numbers that match the port conventions of your Windows computer that we wrote down before, except for the last number which we enter as 0) and hit >enter. Now type 255.255.255.0 and hit >enter. Now type 0.0.0.0 and hit >enter. Now click the IPv6 tab and check to see that it is set to automatic. Click the >Save button. Close the edit connections window. Click the >wifi icon again and select your new network. It will connect if you have not missed any steps. In some cases it may ask for your network password again.

          Now open Thunar as we have been doing all along. Click the >browse network bar in the lower left pane. Do not highlight or attempt to open the Windows Share file. Backspace out the URI command line and type in i/e, smb://169.254.231.94 (use the IPv4 address for your Windows computer we wrote down before) and hit >enter. As in our other tutorials when prompted backspace out your samba user name and enter the Windows administrative account user name and password we previously set up leaving Homegroup as it is. Again then click the file >Users from the files that appear and enter the info again leaving Homegroup as is for group. Open the user file that is the administrative account in your case, and access the files on you Windows computer. If you decide to use Double Commander click >gvfs in the right hand pane, and look for the entry reading something like, samba server with your Windows computer’s address i/e 169.254.231.94, (not the 192.168.0.5 convention that may be there from our last tutorial)  and navigate through the files that appear. You may now access and share files using the more secure ad hoc Windows hosted network via wifi with no router in between. Ranges vary depending sometimes on building construction, and the range of specific 802.11 broadcasters, but I can connect from most areas of the house, except parts of the basement. Best times for channel 1 and 2.4 GHz are of course when there is the least traffic. Give it a try. It may work very well for you, in some cases faster than running through your router.

TC     
All opinions expressed and all advice given by Trinidad Cruz on this forum are his responsibility alone and do not necessarily reflect the views or methods of the developers of Linux Lite. He is a citizen of the United States where it is acceptable to occasionally be uninformed and inept as long as you pay your taxes.
 

 

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