Place the Raspberry PI at the centre of your network

My recent problems with Internet providers, followed by the need to change my ADSL modem-router made me think if it would be wiser to make my home network less router dependent. Local network at my home, like most home networks, relies on the ADSL modem-router for the Dynamic Host Configuration (DHCP). Every time I changed the router I had so to reconfigure its DHCP server in order to restore my network configuration, often not being able to access to some network devices, like the NAS disk, until the DHCP was properly configured.

While looking for a Raspberry DHCP configuration how-to I literally stumbled into this page about using the Raspberry PI as a wireless router. This also inspired me about using the Raspberry also to provide a backup or private WI-FI access.

Hardware set-up

First things first: I already had a Wi-Fi dongle wandering in my drawers, I installed in the Raspberry PI USB port and checked it worked. Not all the wireless interfaces are able to be used in “access point mode”, to check if the one I had was compatible I installed the “iw” utility:

sudo apt-get install iw

executing the command:

iw list

I got a detailed list of the network interface features, among them in the the supported interfaces modes:

Supported interface modes:

* IBSS

* managed

* AP

* AP/VLAN

* WDS

* monitor

* mesh point

i got confirm that the interface could work as access point.

Bridging between two wireless routers

I recently stepped into the wireless world. I changed Internet provider and I had to send back them the old modem they leased me and buy a new one. I so decided not only to buy a wireless router modem but also an extra wireless router. My idea was to make them connect together and get rid of the wire crawling under the carpet across all the living room (the phone socket and the computer room are quite in the opposite side of my house).