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Re: using laptop as wireless access file server [SOLVED-sort of]

This is to follow up my own previous post based on experiments and
emails with Alex Pilon and Dimitry Korovkin.

1) I've found lots of suggestions on the net, but they do differ in details and
my trials -- rather cursory, so I don't claim them to be authoritative -- were
only partly successful. hostapd "worked" so I could get an SSID but attempted
connection failed, I believe because I did not get dhcp set up correctly. I
plan to do a more thorough review and trial of this, since I really should learn
more about such things, but because of (2) and (3) there is much less urgency.

2) Ubuntu 20.4 LTS has "Turn on WiFi Hotspot" as an option under the settings
(triple vertical dots in Wireless settings). For some reason this was greyed
out when I tried it first (several postings on net about this). I found trying
"Connect to Hidden network" and then backing out let me access this option.
I did this on the Dell Inspiron 11 3168 we have, a rather cruddy laptop -- looks
nice, performs like a glacier before global warming. It worked fine, and when I
plugged in a wifi dongle I have, it worked as a bridge. Installed openssh server
and voila, sshfs works fine. So this solves the infrastructure part of my
original quest to a degree that I could live with.

3) Ubuntu no longer supports i386, so my Asus EEE 901 can't use (2). But Dimitry
pointed out that Ubuntu 18.04 is available in i386 and there is a package
linux-wifi-hostspot available. I've done the Ubuntu download, but not tried yet.
I'm thinking that rather than do another setup on the EEE (which is running rather
nicely -- faster it seems than the 10 year younger Dell -- under Bunsen Lithium,
I'll see if I can do a live-USB with persistence and the hotspot installed. That
could be an interesting "project". Given the quite large USB flash drives these
days, it might be "interesting" as a neat portable archiver for meeting files
etc.

Cheers,

John Nash

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