20

I've seen a fair number of internet sites and forums that provide details on how to turn the Pi into an access point or a router.

I've also seen that there are plenty of how tos out there on how to turn the Pi into a NAS drive I'm not really concerned about that part of this project.

What I'd like to be able to do is to sort of combine those two ideas.

I'd like to have the Pi generate it's own network that I can connect to either via ssh or to be able to treat an attached usb drive as a NAS drive, but without the presence of a pre existing wifi network or LAN connection.

As I said above I'm not worried about the NAS part of this. What I'd like to know is if the Pi can be used to make a non internet connected standalone self generated wifi network.

Thoughts on if this is possible and how would be appreciated. Thank you for your time, Jon

Jon
  • 301
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3

2 Answers2

6

My answer assumes that the question is how do I connect to a Raspberry Pi using an Ad-hoc wireless connection.

I found this posting that gives an example of how to configure a Raspberry Pi to connect to an Ad-hoc wireless network:

# Perform each of the following using sudo
ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 mode ad-hoc
iwconfig wlan0 essid "Pi"
ifconfig wlan0 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0

The problem you have now is how do other devices connect to this ad-hoc network since there isn't a DHCP server. You could configure static IP addresses on each of your other devices.

If this is what you want, but you also want DHCP, we can research how to setup a DHCP server on the Pi.

HeatfanJohn
  • 3,125
  • 3
  • 24
  • 36
  • @Jon if this solved your problem, please be sure to mark this as the ideal solution (check mark). – earthmeLon May 17 '14 at 16:22
  • Here is a tutorial which can help : http://raspberrypihq.com/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-a-wifi-router/ – Epoc Jan 15 '15 at 09:52
6

Yes. You can turn your Pi into a fully fledged WiFi access point. You can go further and even use it as NAT for DSL/aDSL, with more advanced firewall rules and configurations

Issue 11 of MagPi has a very good tutorial on how to do this.

Then you can install whatever other media software or NAS configuration you need.

goldilocks
  • 58,859
  • 17
  • 112
  • 227
Piotr Kula
  • 17,307
  • 6
  • 65
  • 104