Connect 3 laptops

Question

I am working on a problem but not able to solve it. It goes like this

I have 3 laptops, laptop1 is connected to wired network , laptop2 is in having wireless connection with laptop1 , laptop3 is not in range of wireless of laptop1 now i want to access net on laptop3 by creating a wireless network from laptop2 ?

Now the problem i am having is when i connect to laptop3 through laptop2 , laptop2 breaks its connection with laptop1 ?

How to solve the problem any hints for Linux(Ubuntu 12.04) OS?

Answer 1

As far as know, it is not possible to join 2 wireless LAN networks with one adapter. Maybe the best solution would be to buy a second cheap WLAN adapter for laptop 2. Then you can bridge the connection to adapter1 and thus laptop one.

If you want laptop 2 to be a real access point (which is nice and gets rid off some address problems and more) i can recommend you hostapd. It's well explained on Ubuntu wikis and easy to use. With this, you can create a hotspot-like wireless LAN on laptop 2 and join it with laptop 3. Laptop 2 provides internet (or just network)connection to laptop 1.

Of course you don't have to use hostapd, you can set forward-chains in iptables, but that's a bit more of work. And I guess there are some other services witch provide easy routing between two network adapters, you can then use an ad-hoc-network between laptop 2 and 3.