Re: [9front] rpi4 wifi USB dongle

[hiro <23hiro@gmail.com>]

I can tell you generally.

An ethernet client is a computer with a mac address.

Given you have a group of M clients and another group of N clients and
you want to connect them, plug the M clients into a switch with M+1
ports on one side and the N clients into a switch with N+1 ports on
the other side, then use the remaining port and a long cable to
connect them together.

Imagine now the M-AP is a wifi router, and you want to connect it to
the N-AP over wifi.
but here when wifi comes into play not every client is the same. you
have many wifi stations and just one wifi *ap*, if we make M-AP the
wifi AP, you can bridge all the M clients just fine. that works on AP
side.
But if you want to bridge a wifi *station* on the other side, you can
not. a station can only bridge N=1 mac addresses into a wifi.

So, with wifi, either M or N has to be 1. Useless, no?

We have some code in 9front called mat damon, which is like NAT, but
for MAC addresses instead of IP addresses. This way one mac address
can hide all the N other mac addresses and translate between them. But
that's obviously a layer violation, a stupid hack that only exists due
to the limitation of wifi.

On 3/4/21, Daniel Morandini <danielmorandini@me.com> wrote:
>> BPL + ethernet maybe? At least you don't have to drill a hole.
>> powerline is really bad
> BPL is Broadband Power Line right? This house is wired with very
> old copper wires (not twisted), I bet I would not get much out of
> it, but thanks for the suggestion.
>
>> Richard Miller's plan 9 image supports wifi on these machines.
>> As of now there is no wifi dongle support in 9front. You can use an older
>> Android phone's usb tethering (no cell service needed) with nusb/ether in
>> rndis mode.
>> i used to use an external wifi bridge over ethernet
> These are all valuable options, thank you, but hiro is making me think:
>
>> keep in mind wifi cannot really bridge more than one IP (sadly the
> wifi src/destination fields cannot be mapped to ethernet mac addresses
> properly).
> Could you please expand this a little bit more (possibly with
> references)?  I’ve attached to this email a little handmade diagram
> of my home setup.  The line tagged with “long eth cable” was the
> one that I wanted to replace with a wireless connection to some
> receiver device that eventually ethernets with the switch, but still
> I would have had to check what 802.11 is allowing me to do. What
> you tell makes me think that that protocol in this setup in that
> position is not really a viable option right?
>
>> drilling holes is not so bad
> Indeed, this is what I’m going to go for :D
>
> Thank you very much for your help so far,
> dan
>
>