Share wireless Internet connection through ethernet

Question

I want to share the wireless Internet connection on my desktop with my old laptop, through ethernet.

I have ticked the option "Make available to others" on both connections, on my desktop, but my laptop doesn't connect. Am I doing something wrong or is it a bug?

Solution

On the server computer:

1. On the computer, which is connected to the Internet, click the network icon in the panel and go to "Edit Connections..." at the bottom of the menu.

   

2. Double click your Wired Connection (Leave your wireless connection untouched, the one connected to Internet and the one you want to share, as I understand).

   

3. On the "IPv4 Settings tab", select Method: "Shared to other computers"

   

4. Reconnect by clicking on the Wired Network, so it gets a new IP address. (The two computers must be connected by an ethernet cable for this step, so connect them now if you haven't already.)

5. Click on "Connection Information" in the network menu and write down the IP address and network mask (in my case it was assigned 10.42.0.1/255.255.255.0 but I do not know if that will always be the case).

   

On the client computer:

6. Go to "Edit Connections..." and assign a "Manual" Method. Assign an IP address on the same subnetwork (10.42.0.69 for example) and put the IP and network mask you wrote down in "Netmask" "Gateway" and "DNS servers"

   

7. Reconnect to the network to let the new settings be assigned.

8. Pat yourself on your back and surf away!!!

Comments

[user8549605]

I have done the exact same thing on 12.04 before. I am thinking there is a problem with network manager since i have Gnome 3.10 and it got updated today.

[Mechanical snail]

@Rmano: According to that article, modern Ethernet hardware auto-negotiates so crossover cables are not needed. I've also done this before with ordinary Ethernet cables.

[Rmano]

@Mechanical snail: thanks, I didn't noticed that. So I suppose I can dispose my precious manually connected cross-over cable :-)

[bcbc]

possible duplicate of Share Wireless connection with Wired Ethernet Port

[Eric Carvalho]

possible duplicate of How to Connect & Share your Internet Connection (Wired & Wireless)

[Ankur Loriya]

If i try to put wired and wifi network in same network, and configure wired network with manual it will it work ?

[dolmen]

How to do the same, but using DHCP on the client?

[jackyalcine]

This should be marked as the correct answer! :)

[mchid]

I've done this dozens of times. Just use auto instead of manually assigning it on the non-server computer and don't forget to leave ports 67, 68, 52 and 53 open for dhcp and dns access. Also, don't forget that ufw blocks incoming, so you will have to either disable it on the server computer or set the rules accordingly.

[Bob Brunius]

I connected a WiFi router to my Ethernet port so it is doing the DHCP. Steps 1-4 was all I needed. Why this way? Because the paid WiFi connection wasn't letting me have more than one user at a time. Now my wife and I have 4 computers on the same WiFi account. Thanks.

[wordsforthewise]

I tried this with sharing from my laptop to a raspberry pi and it was unsuccessful.

[OlivierBlanvillain]

Relevant: askubuntu.com/questions/64494/…

[Steven C. Howell]

This was perfect for my cluster configuration. I need the compute nodes to each have a fixed IP and share the internet from the head node.

[leomilrib]

This solution worked fine for me. The only think I would like to add is: If the method "Shared to other computers" is not listed on the configuration menu from IPV4 tab (this was my case running Ubuntu 17.10 with default Gnome interface) you can start the network settings from the command line with nm-connection-editor. As seen here.

[Markus]

Wow it took me forever to configure the according netplan on my client because I forgot to set the gateway to the hosts IP-address... So if anybody can use ssh but fails to share the internet connection: Remember your gateway to be your hosts IP!

[esperluette]

This worked for me also from Ubuntu server to Windows client. I did not have to do anything on the client.

[Seamus]

This answer is still useful! But it would be so much more useful if it were updated to reflect the current GUI - or even better, using the CLI tools to do the configuration.

[dobs]

In Cockpit you can manage this settings in Networking page prnt.sc/26efq9n