USB tethered Android phone for WAN?
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I picked up a G2 recently and I'm in a "4G" area. Can I use my android phone as an alternate WAN when tethered via usb?
TIA.
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I tried to do something similar with a much older device but failed due to the driver for the connection. In my case it appeared as a usb NIC which is supported and worked OK execpt that it had some workaround for the fact that it couldn't get the MAC address from the phone so would generate a random one. That would have been fine except that it generated a new, different MAC everytime the phone powered up or was connected. This meant that the NIC had to be assigned each time, obviously not practical.
However your experience may be completely different!
What do you see in the logs when you connect it?
Steve
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Tethered via USB would be questionable at best, since drivers would have to exist for FreeBSD to expose that like a supported network interface.
However, if your phone supports a wifi hotspot function, there isn't any reason why a pfsense box couldn't use that as a WAN if you have a supported wireless card.
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I tried to do something similar with a much older device but failed due to the driver for the connection. In my case it appeared as a usb NIC which is supported and worked OK execpt that it had some workaround for the fact that it couldn't get the MAC address from the phone so would generate a random one. That would have been fine except that it generated a new, different MAC everytime the phone powered up or was connected. This meant that the NIC had to be assigned each time, obviously not practical.
However your experience may be completely different!
What do you see in the logs when you connect it?
Steve
I haven't tried connecting it yet. My computers are still packed.
Tethered via USB would be questionable at best, since drivers would have to exist for FreeBSD to expose that like a supported network interface.
However, if your phone supports a wifi hotspot function, there isn't any reason why a pfsense box couldn't use that as a WAN if you have a supported wireless card.
I use a wireless router setup as an AP for my wireless. And I don't have any slots available to add a wireless card to my pfsense box.
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@Bai:
And I don't have any slots available to add a wireless card to my pfsense box.
There are a couple of Ralink USB wireless LAN chipsets that are supported in FreeBSD and support Access Point mode. I have used the Tenda W311U (pfSense 2.0 RC1 and later) and the TP-LInk TL-WN321G.
