Sharing Wifi with the DS

[sj33]

I'm planning to buy my brother a US copy of Phantasy Star Zero for Christmas. Obviously the main thing about the game is the online play, which is problematic on the DS. No support for WPA, the Nintendo USB WiFi dongles no longer being manufactured, and not working in Vista/Win7 64-bit anyway.We have our home network protected with WPA2 with MAC address filtering, and I'm reluctant to change that.

I was thinking the solution might be to get a USB WiFi stick for the DS to connect to (secured with WEP), and bridge it with the main network. While the stick would be the 'weak spot' in security on the network, it does not have to be plugged in all the time - only when we want to use the DS. Plus we can make the range extremely small.

However, I don't know much about USB Wifi sticks because I never use them. I assume I need to have one that can act as an access point - do I need a special one for this? Will this do? Obviously I'd rather not spend too much seeing as it's only for the DS.

[abigsmurf]

Windows by default doesn't let you turn a dongle into an access point. You have to download utilities to do this (don't know any offhand).

I'm not sure but it may be possible to actually limit the dongle's access to just Nintendo IPs to minimise risk. No idea how that would be done but someone somewhere must have tried it.

[sj33]

So if the manufacturer's own drivers support this, then I can so it? I guess I'd have to check product descriptions to see if they explicitly state 'access point' functionality.

[abigsmurf]

I believe all dongles should potentially support acting as an access point but I know a lot of routers don't. Generally because USB dongles operate through drivers on the PC whereas routers (and ethernet wireless receivers) have to rely on their own firmware.

As I've said, I'm mediumly confident it can be done, but I haven't a clue how. Make sure you research and find a solution before spending money.

[Strolls]

About the best you can do us use WEP.

People will tell you not to do this on your main router, because WEP is really easy to break. But it's actually really unlikely that anyone will do so - breaking WEP is theoretically easy, but probably less than 1% of the population knows how, even though you can easily find a HOWTO online.

If you want to be paranoid, however, buy a second wireless access point, set that up for WEP plug it in to your main AP and only power it on when you want to use the DS. Something like this should do the job. You want one that is sold as a "cable router" not an ADSL router if you want to connect it as a "secondary" like this. You've found a USB stick for £5, but the extra £10 or so for an AP will be a LOT less hassle than setting up your PC for internet connection sharing.

There may be problems playing online if the second router / AP performs NAT, because then you have two layers of NAT, and this can make things difficult. Ideally you want one that operates in "bridged" mode, because this won't have that problem - if you can get one with OpenWRT on it then you're golden. I'm currently using a re-flashed Fonera and the bridging makes it lovely.