Sharing the Pi’s WiFi connection through the Ethernet port
I have a pi running the latest release of raspbian and it’s connected to the Internet using a wireless USB dongle. What I would like to do, is to share the pi’s wifi connection so that any computer connected to the pi using a LAN cable would be able to receive the Internet. I had a look around the Internet but I can’t seem to find anything of relevance. I’m familiar with this process on Windows and Mac OS X, but doing this on the pi has just got me stumped. EDIT: I don’t know whether this helps anyone but I am connected to the Internet on my pi via wlan0, but I would like to share that Internet connection via eth0.
Bridging your WiFi and Ethernet connections on the Pi and plugging it into a router would be simpler. Is this possible for your application?
@tlhIngan unfortunatly not, you see I don’t have access to any Ethernet sockets and I need to boot my laptop from PXE, which has to be done by Ethernet. Also I want to learn more about Linux, and I thought building this project would give me a bit more confidence with Linux. I thought this would be an easier solution as my router is all the way across my house :/ Anyway, thanks for your reply.
I found this tutorial video exactly what you need: youtu.be/IAa4tI4JrgI The Raspberry PI shares internet it gets from wifi to Ethernet port.
@tlhIngan — Can you elaborate? Would creating a bridge require a router too? I want my network audio receiver to share my Pis WiFi over Ethernet and be on the same subnet and DHCP as my main router.
2 Answers 2
For Raspbian Jessie
We will use dnsmasq package for this purpose because it is combined DHCP and DNS server and also easy to configure.
If you want something a little more ‘heavyweight’, you can use the isc-dhcp-server and bind9 packages for DHCP and DNS respectively, but for our purposes, dnsmasq works just fine.
sudo apt-get install dnsmasq We need to configure interfaces. We will assign a static IP address to eth0 which will be used as gateway. Open the interfaces file
sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces Edit the eth0 section like this:
allow-hotplug eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 192.168.2.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 network 192.168.2.0 broadcast 192.168.2.255 Next, we will configure dnsmasq . The shipped dnsmasq config file contains a lot of information on how to use it. So, I will advise to move it and create a new one.
sudo mv /etc/dnsmasq.conf /etc/dnsmasq.conf.orig sudo nano /etc/dnsmasq.conf Paste the following into the new file
interface=eth0 # Use interface eth0 listen-address=192.168.2.1 # listen on # Bind to the interface to make sure we aren't sending things # elsewhere bind-interfaces server=8.8.8.8 # Forward DNS requests to Google DNS domain-needed # Don't forward short names # Never forward addresses in the non-routed address spaces. bogus-priv # Assign IP addresses between 192.168.2.2 and 192.168.2.100 with a # 12 hour lease time dhcp-range=192.168.2.2,192.168.2.100,12h Edit the /etc/sysctl.conf file to enable packet forwarding
Remove the # from the beginning of the line containing net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 This will enable packet forwarding on next reboot. But if you want to try it right now without reboot then do this.
sudo sh -c "echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward" We also need to share RPi’s internet connection with the devices connected over Wi-Fi. We will configure a NAT between eth0 and wlan0 :
sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wlan0 -j MASQUERADE sudo iptables -A FORWARD -i wlan0 -o eth0 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT sudo iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o wlan0 -j ACCEPT However, we need these rules to be applied every time we reboot the Pi, so run sudo sh -c «iptables-save > /etc/iptables.ipv4.nat» to save the rules to the file /etc/iptables.ipv4.nat . Now we need to run this after each reboot, so open the /etc/rc.local file with sudo nano /etc/rc.local and just above the line exit 0 , add the following line:
And that’s all! Now just Reboot your RPi and you will be able to access Internet
Updated for Raspbian Stretch
Above configuration won’t work in newer version of Raspbian. So, I have created a script for this which make it possible in less pain.
Connect to WiFi network using this guide.
Download the script from here. Place it at /home/pi/
Open up /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart file
sudo nano /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart @lxpanel --profile LXDE-pi @pcmanfm --desktop --profile LXDE-pi @xscreensaver -no-splash @point-rpi sudo bash /home/pi/wifi-to-eth-route.sh Make sure you have given full path to the file. And you’re done. Now reboot to see the changes
Thank you very much. Just tested this out on my pi and the connection was fine! Again thanks for your time. I appreciate it.
This is excellent for sharing internet connection with a wireless device. However, I want to access the device from another laptop in my network and that doesn’t work. I guess it’s because they’re in different subnets? Any tip to get around it?
It worked perfectly, although under Raspbian Stretch, I had to manually include the WiFi configuration into the /etc/network/interfaces
I followed your post and the link carefully. My Pi (just did a fresh OS install), whenever I add the «static» word, it’s not even able to connect to the wifi.
Being your purpose provide internet access to your LAN devices, will assume double ‘NAT’ will not be a big issue.
With this configuration you will provide wireless access to non WiFi devices that will benefit from internet access.
Prerequisite
Make sure your Wi-Fi is properly configured and working. if something goes bad your access to the device through `eth0` will be limited or inexistent.
Setup
apt-get update apt-get install network-manager isc-dhcp-server Interfaces
edit the file `/etc/network/interfaces` to match the following, this will set your eth0 a fix ip address (10.10.10.1) and will recreate `resolv.conf`.
auto lo iface lo inet loopback iface default inet dhcp allow-hotplug eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 10.10.10.1 network 10.10.10.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 10.10.10.255 gateway 10.10.10.1 auto wlan0 allow-hotplug wlan0 iface wlan0 inet dhcp wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf up cat /etc/resolv.conf | sed 's/ver /ver 127.0.0.1,/g' > /etc/resolv_local.conf up cat /etc/resolv.conf | sed 's/ver /ver 127.0.0.1,/g' > /etc/resolv.conf DHCP
Modify default `dhcp` configuration to make it authoritative and add the LAN network (10.10.10.*), edit the file `/etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf`, add the following content:
# configuration for the bridge internal subnet. subnet 10.10.10.0 netmask 255.255.255.0
IPTABLES
Now create the following script to setup and start the network on every reboot. The script will dynamically create a few ‘IPTABLES’ rules. Name it `/root/bridge.sh`:
#!/bin/bash LOCAL_IFACE=eth0 INET_IFACE=wlan0 # this is where the dhcp info comes in. We need the default gateway # /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient.wlan0.leases f=/var/lib/dhcp/dhclient.$INET_IFACE.leases GATEWAY=$(cat $f| grep "option route" | tail -1 |awk ''| sed 's/;//') IPT=$(which iptables) # get the wlan address INET_ADDRESS=$(ifconfig $INET_IFACE |grep "inet addr" |awk '' |awk -F$ # Flush the tables $IPT -F INPUT $IPT -F OUTPUT $IPT -F FORWARD $IPT -t nat -F $IPT -t nat -P PREROUTING ACCEPT $IPT -t nat -P POSTROUTING ACCEPT $IPT -t nat -P OUTPUT ACCEPT # Allow forwarding packets: $IPT -A FORWARD -p ALL -i $LOCAL_IFACE -j ACCEPT $IPT -A FORWARD -i $INET_IFACE -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT # Packet masquerading $IPT -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o $INET_IFACE -j SNAT --to-source $INET_ADDRESS $IPT -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o $LOCAL_IFACE -j MASQUERADE # save the created tables iptables-save > /etc/network/iptables #cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward # make sure we are forwarding packets echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward sysctl --system > /dev/nul #remove the default route, usually on eth0 interface route del default #ifdown $INET_IFACE && ifup $INET_IFACE #ensure is $INET_IFACE now. route add default gw $GATEWAY $INET_IFACE gw=$(route -n -A inet | grep '^0.0.0.0' |awk '< print $2 >') echo "default route is now " $gw Finally
Finally, you need to run the script on each reboot, add the following two lines before the `exit 0` on the file `/etc/rc.local’ to run the script created before.
# will run the bridge on startup sudo ./root/bridge.sh Now, just restart your device and the bridge will be working for you.
pd: sudo was omitted for brevity. Use sudo -iE to have a session as root