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Bridge WiFi to Switch for other devices to connect to? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by LunchEnjoyer@lemmy.world to c/networking@sh.itjust.works

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Hiya, I've got a desktop (connected to wifi), and a server (without a networking card), and I do not have access to Ethernet/or the router. However, I do have a networking switch - and was wondering if I could bridge the WiFi from my desktop(Nobara), to the Switch, and have my other devices such as Raspberry Pi and my main server connect to that. If thats possible please let me know how, or point me to some resources, I believe I have to touch iptables in this case, but have never tweaked those before.

This is a very temporary solution for not having access to a router. But gotta live like this for 5 months, so gotta find a solution to get WiFi on my server, as cheap as possible.

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[–] azdle@news.idlestate.org 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

You'll want to bridge your WiFi and Ethernet interfaces. As always the Arch Wiki has instructions for setting up a bridge interface, there's multiple options depending on how you have your network setup on your system: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/network_bridge

[–] Markaos@lemmy.one 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Pretty sure you can't do that with standard WiFi. Or rather you kinda can, but you need to know how it's different from Ethernet so you understand why everything keeps breaking.

For example DHCP is absolutely out of the question, as it relies on the MAC address to assign IP addresses. So static IPs will be required. And you also need to make your "switch" aware of the fact that it now needs to route IP packets coming from WiFi, because everything on that side of the network will send the packets directly to the switch.

[–] azdle@news.idlestate.org 1 points 8 months ago

Interesting, I swear I've done exactly this before and didn't have DHCP troubles, but that was like a decade ago, so I might be misremembering.