Share your Internet Connection Safely with DD-WRT

There are many ways you can share your Internet connection to neighbors over WiFi. Disable security on your wireless network, or check out one of these organizations: Open-Mesh, Meraki or FON.

One of my favorite open source projects is DD-WRT. It is a software package that can be installed on many off-the-shelf wireless routers that you can find at Best Buy and the like. It turns your $50 router into a $500 one. I’ve run this software on my home wireless router for about a year now and I’ve always wanted to figure out how to share my Internet connection without allowing people full access to my network and all the computers on it. I found a great article about this.

The steps on how to set this up is in the last half of the video. The copy and paste settings that I reference in the video are after the jump.

If you are using DD-WRT’s default settings, the settings below and the process in the video should get you up and running without a problem.

DNSMasq Options:
interface=wl0.1
dhcp-option=wl0.1,3,192.168.2.1
dhcp-option=wl0.1,6,192.168.1.1
dhcp-range=wl0.1,192.168.2.100,192.168.2.200,1440m

Firewall Commands
iptables -I INPUT -i wl0.1 -m --state NEW -j logaccept
iptables -I FORWARD -i wl0.1 -o br0 -j logdrop
iptables -I FORWARD -i br0 -o wl0.1 -j logdrop

Here are instructions on how to install DD-WRT, and here is a list of compatible wireless routers.

Let me know if this works for you!