A wifi-connected laptop as a home server May 29, 2008
Posted by claudio in Uncategorized.Tags: GNU/Linux, Linux, Ubuntu, wifi, wpasupplicant
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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). (more…)
