[OS X Emacs] Setting up wireless printer in hotel room

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi,

Not sure this is really an Emacs question, so I'm staying off-list.

On Sun, Aug 30, 2020 at 12:32:07PM -0400, Bill Rising wrote:
>
>From what I could find online, it would be necessary to get a router, and then hook that router to the hotel router in bridge mode. [1]. The computers would then hook to the bridge and the bridge would then connect to the outside world or the printer or from computer to computer.
>

A bridge would work.  Or you could just set up a LAN with the wireless access point authenticated to the hotel network and all the laptops and the printer hooked to the WLAN itself.  This has the disadvantage that access to the Internet will almost certainly be through a double NAT.  You might have to authenticate with a single laptop first and then get the wireless AP to "clone the MAC address".  I used to do this sort of thing pretty often with an Airport Extreme back when many hotels had wired-only networks and I wanted wireless in my room.  This tends to work better if there's a wired connection.  If it's wireless only in the room then you'll need an AP that has enough radios to avoid a lot of cross-talk -- you probably want a dual-mode and use one of the bandwidth ranges to talk to the hotel network and the other one to talk to your local computers.

>Is there a way to figure out if this will work before plunking money down on a router?

Basically any wireless AP/router you can lay your hands on should have this capability in the wired-hotel case, so it shouldn't be an expensive experiment to run.  The split-use wireless cases are trickier, and you might want something that can run dd-wrt or one of the other open source firmwares (because they often have more controls for users).


>[1] There is a post on HP's site [2] which talks about hooking up a tp-link tl-wr702N wireless nano router which explicitly states that the router needs to go into bridge mode, so I'm using engineering induction to mean that putting any router in bridge mode is the solution. This particular router would be poor choice, because the multiple computers will need to be able to be streaming schoolwork simultaneously and it has pretty limited bandwidth.
>

If the concern is limited bandwidth, I think you need to worry about the hotel network.  My experience is that most of them are configured very badly and have a lot of bufferbloat problems and other congestion.

Good luck!

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com