Creating the network

Apple makes it surprisingly easy to create a quick wireless network. The first thing you’ll need to do is make sure you’ve got Wifi enabled. Even if you’re used to connecting to the internet over ethernet, or hard-wired, you’ll need Wifi enabled in order to create the network. To enable Wifi, or check if it is enabled, just click the Wifi icon in the top right corner of your screen (pictured below, left,) and make sure it says “Airport: On“. If it’s already on, perfect! If not, click it to turn it on. Then, click that same icon, and near the bottom of the menu, choose “Create Network…”  like pictured below, right.

You’ll be greeted with the following window:

Leaving the channel as automatic will generally work fine, but depending on how long you plan on leaving the network active, you may want to set a password. If you do click “Require Password“, the dialog box will expand, and all you need to to is enter the password of your choice for the network, along with the type of security. Both are WEP, and so for the most part the default is fine.  (If only setting up most Wifi networks were this easy!) Security enabled or not, this is pretty standard, and when you’re finished, just clicking “OK” will set up everything up for you.

Connecting to the network

To be sure your network is now active, you can visually check where your Wifi icon used to be in the Menu bar, as it should now be replaced with the Ad-Hoc network icon, which looks like this:

Seeing this icon means you’ve successfully created your network. You can click on it, and you should see under Devices, the name you assigned to the network when you created it.

Now this may be the best part of this whole process. To connect your wireless device, be it an iDevice, Android smartphone, blackberry, or netbook, you don’t need to do anything different than you would with a normal Wifi network, be it heading over to your iPhone/iPad/iPod’s settings screen, hitting Wifi, and selecting your network, or just going to your Windows taskbar and selecting your Wifi network through the contextual menu. All you need to do is sign on to the network, and you’ll be on the internet, by way of your computer!

Additional Uses

Now that you’re on a network with your computer, you can use it in ways aside from browsing the internet as well. On iDevices, you can use your device as an iTunes remote with the Remote app. You can also sync apps with the cloud that you normally couldn’t.

Have another creative use for this, or want to know if it can be used for something specific? Hit up the comments!

2. Go to Network and Sharing Center (Control Panel -> Network and Internet -> Network and Sharing Center)

3. Click on the 3G connection. In my case, the network name is Singtel.

4. Click Properties at the bottom.

5. Go to Sharing tab. Check the box “Allow others network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection”. In the dropdown box, select “Wireless Network Connection“. Once done, click the Settings button.

6. Check the last box “Web Server (HTTP)”. This will allow other computer to access Internet via this connection.

Click OK to return to the Network and Sharing center.

7. Next,  click on the “Set up a new connection or network”

8. Scroll down until you find the option “Set up a wireless ad hoc network”. Select it.

9. Give this network a name and a password. Click Next.

10. On the next screen, click “Turn on Internet Connection sharing”.

That’s it. You can now connect to this computer and access the Internet from other computers.

Is there any easier method?

If you find that the above method is too difficult for you, then Connectify can make your life much easier.

Connectify is a free (as of now) software that enables you to create a WIFI hotspot with a snap. It is easy to use and there is only minimal configuration required.

1. Download and install Connectify.

2. Run Connectify.

3. Click the Connectify icon at the system tray.

4. Give the network a name and a password. Under the Internet dropdown box, select your 3G connection (it works for wireless connection and LAN connection as well).

Once you are done, simply click the Start Hotspot button at the bottom. You will be able to connect to this computer and access the Internet now.

Image credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Of course, times have changed now. I use Linux almost exclusively and rarely see the Windows login prompt. Most Linux distributions are far more secure than Windows, out of the box, but the threat is still there and having a good firewall protecting your computer is still a good idea.

Almost all Linux distributions comes bundled with a firewall software known as iptables, which is a command line based software for configuring Firewall rules for all network traffic to and from the Linux kernel.

Being a command line tool, the syntax tends to be a bit cryptic and even, intimidating for the first time user. This is where Firestarter comes into the picture.

Firestarter is a graphical interface for the iptables firewall. To install Firestarter on Debian, which is the Linux distribution that I use, give the following command.

sudo apt-get install firestarter

And then launch firestarter using the Applications -> Internet menu entry.

Instead of an intimidating interface, Firestarter uses a simple wizard to take new users through the steps necessary for configuring the firewall.

The first step is to identify which network interface will the firewall listen to. This is usually the primary network interface of the machine which is connected to the Internet.

Next comes the part where the user is asked to chose wether the particular machine is used for sharing the Internet connection. Select the secondary network interface of the machine which is connected to the rest of the internel network, if this machine is also being used for sharing the internet connection.

That’s it. The firewall is ready to be deployed.

Click on the Save button and you will see the Firewall status window. This is where you can see current statistics about your newly created firewall and also tweak the rules even more if you so desire.

By default, this firewall is fairly restrictive but if, for example, you want to create a rule that only your friend should be able to remotely access this machine, then you can add a policy to whitelist your friend’s IP address.

Firestarter is, in my opinion, a very simple and easy to use utility to configure and manage the iptables firewall, both for the novice and the experienced user.

Do you use any other firewall software on Linux ? Let us know in the comments?