Sharing your Vodafone Mobile Connect internet with Linux

This article will describe the details on how to setup your linux machine to share its internet connection with users connected to a router through your Vodafone Mobile Connection internet connection.

Vodafone Mobile Connect Card driver for Linux is a tool that allows you to establish a connection to the Internet using 3G cards. Details on installing the driver for your Vodafone Mobile connect onto your linux machine click here.

To find your driver click here.

I did have issues with the default DNS server configuration provided by the drivers. If you experience something similar try the following IP addresses for your DNS configuration:

• 208.67.220.220 
• 208.67.222.222

Once you have got your internet connection working on the linux machine, set the default gateway to point to your internet connection that will probably have an alias of ppp0. In Fedora linux I would type the following:

route add default gw 0.0.0.0 ppp0

If you type 'route' at the command-line you should see something similar to this:

[root@localhost ~]# route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
10.64.64.64     *               255.255.255.255 UH    0      0        0 ppp0
192.168.1.0     *               255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 eth0
link-local      *               255.255.0.0     U     0      0        0 eth0
default         *               0.0.0.0         U     0      0        0 ppp0

You also want to give your linux machine a static IP so that users on the router can point to your machine as their gateway. This is the following configuration I used:

IP: 192.168.1.105
subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
gateway: 0.0.0.0

 Now on the client computer that's connected to the router, configure their network settings to have the following:

Gateway: 192.168.1.105
subnet mask: 255.255.255.0

Now you can have multiple computers all sharing the same internet connection going through the Vodafone Mobile Connect card.

Cheers,
Phil