# Android tethering and NAT



## Johnny2Bad (Jun 16, 2018)

As I am a poor man, I've decided to try tethering a wireless device to access the internet with my small LAN.

I came across this page in the handbook, which tells me how to tether a device by loading it into the kernel. Just wondering how I could get it to tether during startup so I can still perform NAT (Network Address Translation)?

Thanking you in advance,
Jonathan.


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## Johnny2Bad (Nov 15, 2018)

Well from my own personal adventures with this issue. DON'T DO IT! With an Android anyway. And not in Australia. I think FreeBSD isn't guilty because it does the same thing on Linux distributions I use.

I have tried it on Android 6.0 and it is unreliable at best just doing basic web browsing. It's rather annoying to have to....
`dhclient ue[I]0[/I]`

at the terminal (where ue0 is the interface created when you enable tethering on the device) every time it drops out which can be quite often.Even during this posting I had to reset the tether to this linux box.

As I do not have FreeBSD at the moment I think I will limit myself to trying to script it in linux first, doing NAT (Network Address Translation) on the fly. But overall I think network stability is not high enough or fast enough too support multiple clients.

Regards,
Jonathan.


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## Phishfry (Nov 15, 2018)

So its not the cellular network that's the problem but tethering.
My Sierra modem uses PPP which is a pain to setup but once done done it works wonderful.
Even with a Straight Talk PAYGO tablet SIM.

Do you have any older laptops not in use? They make the cheapest MiFi possible.
Slip in a SIM and connect via PPP with the internal modem and setup the WiFi as an access point.
Plus you can use the laptop ethernet to feed a router.
I use dnsmasq with two seperate IP ranges for ethernet and WiFi. I did have to learn pf before deploying.
Previously I used pfSense as my MiFi O/S.

Because laptops use the screen area for antenna I feel signal strength is better than a cellular phone.


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