Can a internet connection from a laptop be used through a big computer

Please send us the results of

ifconfig

Go up to the top taskbar and click on

"Applications" menu - "Accessories" - "Terminal"

Into the terminal window type

ifconfig

then copy&paste the results into here

Good luck with this
Regards from
Tom :)

What we are really trying to find out is ...

Does your laptop have 2 network connections, one that connects to the internet and another that the main computer can reach?

The connection to the main computer could be a whole range of different things, perhaps even an ethernet cable between them (a twisted pair cable rather than straight through). The internet connection to your laptop might be a usb stick on a broadband wireless connection. typing ifconfig on your laptop would let us know. Or even just listing the heading like eth0 eth1, lo - stuff like that would help.

Good luck with this
Regards from
Tom :)

$ ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:21:70:d2:59:80
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:2614546254 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
          Interrupt:220 Base address:0x8000

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:23:08:39:b4:c0
          inet addr:192.168.1.135 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::223:8ff:fe39:b4c0/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
          RX packets:272 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:1571
          TX packets:320 errors:1 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:214645 (209.6 KB) TX bytes:59998 (58.5 KB)
          Interrupt:16

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
          inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1
          RX packets:1308 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:1308 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:71441 (69.7 KB) TX bytes:71441 (69.7 KB)

What do I do now?

Oh hey sorry. i'm not sure what to do next so i was hoping that someone else would see the question was still "Open" and help but now i've written an answer they'll see it as "Answered" again and might not look for ages :(

Sorry, you'll have to write another comment in here now so that the question gets flagged as "Open" again.

I think that eth1 is the internet connection for your laptop and i think that means that eth0 should be able to connect to your main machine. There are questions like - do you have an ethernet cable connecting the two machines? If not then does you main machine have wireless connection (or i think blutooth works?) Also wondering what Operating System your main machine is using. Is it Xp or Ubuntu too?

Anyway, i've not managed to do this myself but i dug out some reading for you to see if there's anything relevant in there for after you post a reply in here. Good luck with that.

Sometimes responses can take a while, it depends who's around
Ok, so here's happy hunting
https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/internet/C/networking.html
https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/serverguide/C/network-configuration.html
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NetworkConnectionBridge
One of them i noticed talking about static ip addresses and i think we need to aim for dynamic ip addresses to be served by the dhcp server. i'm not sure if the laptop would have to be the dhcp server to your main machine.

Somewhere else they were talking about jsut installing the Firestarter Firewall as it sorted it all out for you and has a nice gui but it didn't work for me.

Sorry this is really muddled, good luck and have fun
Regards from
Tom :)

Assuming that some means exist for the main computer and the laptop to talk together, and the laptop has a connection to the internet at the same time it should be workable.

I shall be back w/ some Q's and instructions on getting answers shortly, need to go away for a while on personal business :)

C U soon,
== Buz

Do you know how to use the command line or will you need excruciatingly detailed instructions on that?

Hope to see an answer to that when I return.

== Buz :)

OK, I will assume for the moment that you know how to run a command on a terminal and how to show us the results :)

The "route" command will give more info for this job than "ifconfig", so run that on your laptop and give us the results.

Now, what OS is your main computer running? Are the two presently able to talk at all? Does the main computer have access to the I'net independently? If it is running Linux also, give us the output from "route" from that too, while it is connected online.

It may take quite a bit of work (or may not) to get one computer online via the other. Are you ready for that?

== Buz :)

This might help http://www.ubuntugeek.com/sharing-internet-connection-in-ubuntu.html

I concur. Provided the other conditions are right, that link provides several step by step recipes to do what you need/want.

If u decide ur q is answered, u can decide which of us helped the most.

Good Luck,
== Buz :)

Thanks Buz and Marcobra, i was hoping you guys would show up. I thought getting the info from ifconfig would help as my network dude always asks me for that and the command in Windows is similar which makes it easy to confuse the two ;)

Good luck getting this sorted

If you are still having trouble with this then please post it as a new question. Only the most recent questions tend to get looked at so posting/reposting a question just before america arrives online gives the best chance of getting a good few answers.

If the problem has been resolved then please follow the link to the forum thread and mark it as Solved.

Good luck and many regards from
Tom :)