A wifi-connected laptop as a home server

As probably many people nowadays, I only have laptops at home. Actually one for me and one for my girlfriend (luckily babies don’t need laptops yet ). As we made the move to laptops a long time ago, you end with older – perfectly fine – laptops. Similarly, I stopped making holes in the walls a long time ago and went wireless.

Laptop and wifi do not sound like a winning server combination, but for me they are. Happily, nowadays wifi is as easy in Linux as in Windows or MacOsX. But do you really want you laptop to use a graphical semi-interactive process to get it’s – often random – IP address? What if the machine will run without an X server?

wpasupplicant and the old manual network configuration come to the rescue. I use this configuration for my graphical over-sized living room divx/mpeg/flac/ogg/mp3-player laptop connected to my tv and stereo and non graphical print server (an old trusty amd 350mhz cpu with 160 mb ram and 4 gb disk) in the home office (far from the living room where we often work).

1. If wpasupplicant is not installed, apt-get it:

$ sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant

2. Create a wpasupplicant config file. Mine looks like this and lives in /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf. My config looks like this (a wpa2-personal wifi router, you need to put your own values where you find []):

root@melbourne:~# cat /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
network={
ssid="[your ssid network name]"
scan_ssid=1
proto=WPA2
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP TKIP
group=CCMP TKIP WEP104 WEP40
psk="[Your wpa2 ascii password]"
priority=9
}

3. Configure the network. Here my wifi card is recognized as ath1 and the driver is madwifi. Change accordingly.

root@melbourne:~# cat /etc/network/interfaces
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto ath1
iface ath1 inet static
address 192.168.1.3
gateway 192.168.1.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
pre-up /sbin/wpa_supplicant -Bw -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -i ath1 -D madwifi
post-down pkill -9 wpa_supplicant

4. Restart the network settings:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

5. Go on and install the software you need or disable what you don’t if you are low on resources.

That’s it.

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