Hi everyone
My Wireless ISP is closing down our local tower, and I have the choice of migrating to 3G, or nothing.
Rather than moving to 3G or losing my net entirely I wanted to setup a long-range wifi link through a public open AP.
I have two 800mhz, 512mb RAM, 4gb CF thin clients with Ethernet and PCI wifi cards and wanted to link these both to the open AP and run a VPN tunnel through the wireless link.
On the side with net I wanted to install a download manager to be remotely controlled and shared on that LAN, on the other side I wanted to setup a transparent proxy, both of these are to minimize data throughput to the essential over the VPN.
ClearOS appears to be a viable solution for this problem as both hardware constraints and a bittorrent client appear to be included transmission. (a remote controllable download manager for other files would also be nice, but not required if anyone can recommend)
My first issue is with linking into the wifi network, clearOS does not appear to allow client mode on the wifi cards on either machine, the only post I could find relating to client connection to an existing wifi network mentioned trouble with double NAT, but did not assist in establishing the aforementioned link.
Does anyone have experience in a setup of this type either with ClearOS or another linux distribution that would likely satisfy the software and hardware constraints of my setup?
My Wireless ISP is closing down our local tower, and I have the choice of migrating to 3G, or nothing.
Rather than moving to 3G or losing my net entirely I wanted to setup a long-range wifi link through a public open AP.
I have two 800mhz, 512mb RAM, 4gb CF thin clients with Ethernet and PCI wifi cards and wanted to link these both to the open AP and run a VPN tunnel through the wireless link.
On the side with net I wanted to install a download manager to be remotely controlled and shared on that LAN, on the other side I wanted to setup a transparent proxy, both of these are to minimize data throughput to the essential over the VPN.
ClearOS appears to be a viable solution for this problem as both hardware constraints and a bittorrent client appear to be included transmission. (a remote controllable download manager for other files would also be nice, but not required if anyone can recommend)
My first issue is with linking into the wifi network, clearOS does not appear to allow client mode on the wifi cards on either machine, the only post I could find relating to client connection to an existing wifi network mentioned trouble with double NAT, but did not assist in establishing the aforementioned link.
Does anyone have experience in a setup of this type either with ClearOS or another linux distribution that would likely satisfy the software and hardware constraints of my setup?
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I'm getting somewhere, and I hope people are not too impatient with a slow old windows user; Half of my problem has been not knowing the correct search terms, resulting in convoluted and often useless results, once I learned a simple search like "site to site" I saved myself much trouble in basic understanding of this configuration.
The 'server' I believe is mostly setup: Running ClearOS with OpenVPN server, eth0 to my LAN, wlan0 in Managed mode connected to the remote AP. I can connect with a windows machine to the PPTP and OpenVPN server and access machines on the LAN and have routing through the pfsense server to the net.
I was a little worried the encryption and slow (800mhz) CPU would cause network troubles, but throughput seems fine while the connection holds, unfortunately the connection only holds for a while then drops and I am unable to immediately reconnect, possibly data errors are causing the link to fail?
The second machine is not being so helpful, the RTL-8187 USB wifi card I have is detected, but once in Managed mode fails to receive an IP from the DHCP server, when manually assigned it still fails to respond, and will not show link as up.
I suspect I may need an updated driver, but the driver from raltek is in a tar.gz, and I have no knowledge of the installation process, or if this will even help.
Unfortunately need to use this USB for the moment as it's a high power (2000mW) unit and the 15+km link is not sustainable with my through Ethernet>wifi AP and antenna configuration.
Finally I am unsure of a simple way to setup OpenVPN in client mode on this machine connecting to the OpenVPN server.
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