YiBi's Life|Live Log

This is the geeky sequel to my last Linux to IPhone tethering episode where we used and abused the IPhone tethering function.

Some background, I’m one of those people who contracted (and got stuck) with the 50G SingTel Mobile Broadband Plan before the days of 12GB IPhone plan. My usage was about 4G per month, so none of the plans was suitable for me at that time.

Anyway, that aside. For some reasons my team had to work in a place where we had no internet access while we are building the network for high speed internet access. What irony! The only systems engineer in the team (me) decided that I had alot of data to spare, so here we go…use and abuse!

Configuration’s simple. First you have to setup tethering as per my previous post on IPhone tethering. Once you are done with that, do the follow steps. And again, it’s a 5 minute quick hack.

1. vi linux-router.sh

2. Paste the following into the shell script

#!/bin/bash
/sbin/ifconfig wlan0 192.168.0.1 255.255.255.0
/sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o bnep0 -j MASQUERADE
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i bnep0 -o wlan0 -m state –state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i wlan0 -o bnep0 -j ACCEPT

3. Save the file.
4. chmod 700 linux-router.sh
5. ./linux-router.sh
6. Done!

My colleagues are connected to a WIFI router, hence the use of wlan0 as the “inside” interface. bnep0 is the “outside” interface connected to the IPhone via bluetooth. All the machines point to my laptop as the gateway, which bears the IP address 192.168.0.1. All of them are NAT’d out from the outside interface.

I have 2Mbps for my plan. Good enough for the team to check email and do some simple web browsing for information.

There are other things you can do like transparent proxying so that you save abit of bandwidth.

Leave a comment if you have any questions on the configurations. Have fun!

When I saw this heading, I can’t help laughing. ST can’t be more right. The article talks about why Singapore broadband lags behind. One of the reason quoted was that we do not have a high speed fibre network here. Do I agree? If you ask me, no. What do think? We are going to get our high speed fibre network in the next fews year to come. Let’s see how things turn out then.

Read the full article here.

Has anyone checked the coverage check at OpenNet’s website lately? A friend of mine checked his postal code and was presented with the sign up page, presumably for the installation of the fibre into his home.

This means that his estate is probably one of the first to get access to the Next Generation Broadband Network when commercial operations starts next year in Q1. I’m looking forward to see more services leveraging on this potentially high speed network.

One of the items on my personal wish list is to see storage players providing high speed secured backup and data access. Coupled with the availability of wireless network (3G, Wireless@SG), I will be able to access a single copy of my data over my many devices, instead of having to transfer to them to each machine physically, or accessing them off a remote server. High speed helps, especially when I do WebDAV for editing some of my documents stored on the servers.

But while I’m excited with all the prospects, my estate at Tampines is only getting the fibre in 2011. Anti climax.

Recent news on the Next Gen NBN can be found from the following

Rollout of Next Gen NBN Begins

Next Gen NBN Transforming the Way We Work, Live, Learn and Play