In this video, we finish transforming a Raspberry Pi into a powerful Wi-Fi repeater to extend your network’s range! Follow along as we set up the access point, test connectivity with a nested Ubuntu VM, configure static routes, and troubleshoot terminal issues. Perfect for tech enthusiasts looking to boost their home network or set up servers further away. From ping tests to SSH connections, we cover it all. Subscribe for more DIY tech tutorials, and check out our website for more guides! #RaspberryPi #WiFiRepeater #Networking
Introduction and Setup Recap 00:00:00
Testing Access Point 00:00:14
Inner Ubuntu VM Boot 00:00:28
Virtual Machine Inception 00:01:12
Network Connectivity Test 00:01:49
Ping and Routing Success 00:02:12
IPv4 and Domain Testing 00:02:38
Font Size and Terminal Issues 00:03:02
Installing Terminator 00:03:24
Adding Static Route 00:04:47
Persistent Route Configuration 00:08:48
Network Settings Adjustment 00:11:02
Router Static Route Discussion 00:13:32
SSH Connection Test 00:14:46
Final Thoughts and Subscribe 00:16:20
Thanks for watching!
Find us on other social media here:
- https://www.NeuralLantern.com/social
Please help support us!
- Subscribing + Sharing on Social Media
- Leaving a comment or suggestion
- Subscribing to our Blog
- Watching the main “pinned” video of this channel for offers and extras
All right, we’re back. So, uh, my goodness, this video is enormous. We have just finished up setting
up the, uh, the forwarding and the wireless access point and DNS mask and all that stuff.
Now we need to find out if the access point actually works. So the pie is sitting on my
desk. It’s got the dongle plugged in and, um, I want to log into a machine that can connect,
to do i have a nested virtual machine here that i made just for this video i’m calling it inner ubuntu
so you should release your inner ubuntu
i guess hopefully this even boots i only used it one time um let me get rid of like the
the toolbar is it going to work my cpu is now burning out of control
okay this is going to be super slow i’m just telling you right now
this computer’s already pretty crappy and i have a hypervisor that i’m recording on
and then inside that sorry i have a virtual machine that i’m recording on and then inside
that virtual machine there’s another virtual machine that we’re launching it’s like
it’s the virtual machine inception so let me see if i can log in here
Let me see if I can log in here.
Okay.
Seems to have booted.
Let me look at the details real fast.
Oh my God.
I don’t even know where I am anymore.
There’s like three toolbars that I’m looking at.
Three start menus.
So network manager, now I’m back from another cut.
For some reason I didn’t type the SSID incorrectly.
Well, la de fricking da.
So I’m just going to, I guess I typed it in wrong.
Copy pasting it seems to work this time.
Anyway, successfully activated.
So if we do, so remember this inner VM, it doesn’t even have a network card.
It only has the Wi-Fi dongle.
I can do ping 8.8.8.8 to see if we’re online.
We are actually online.
The access point works.
It’s routing.
it’s routing um this should be able to ping my main router 1.1 yep and then 1.101 nice so basically
at this point let me try like a domain name here google.com yeah okay google.com works let’s try
ipv4 works ipv6 unreachable well we’re not on ipv6 i guess i forgot yeah we didn’t add ipv6 yet so
for the regular you know the old school IPV works so at this point the clients
connected to the PI access point can access the rest of the network and they
can access the internet the next thing that we should probably think about
doing is increasing the font size of the dang terminal but besides that I want to
have the rest of the network be able to access clients behind the access point
because you know for me I want to be able to set up servers that are a little
to set up servers that are a little bit further away and you know boost their signal with an
access point what’s going on here i hate this terminal you know what i don’t care i’m going
to do it i’m going to install terminator because i know how to set up the fun size on that one
anyway so the next thing pseudo app update update is what we have to do first
the next thing i’m going to do is set up a route so that we can connect from land clients to clients
So if you look here at the recording that we’re doing, at the main VM that we were in this entire time, we can’t actually ping stuff that’s on the.5.1 subnet.
In fact, we don’t actually even know what the address is.
So if you notice, I can ping 192.168.1.123, and that works because the pi.123 is on the same subnet as the rest of the network.
subnet as the rest of the network. I can also ping 192.168.1.147
because that is also part of the same subnet as the rest of the network.
I can’t ping 192.168.5.1 because
I guess I can, but for sure we’re not going to be able to ping the client that’s inside of the
so I can just get out of this freaking tournament.
And so you can,
because I know this is kind of hard to read, right?
I don’t like that I’m showing you
like a super small front screen.
If you can’t read,
maybe I should just tell you what we did real fast.
I mean, you saw the commands to connect before
on the outer VM,
but I’ll just remind you,
you sudo network manager CLI we wouldn’t do connection add we would actually say device
Wi-Fi connect and then we would name the SSID you know the SSID’s name and then we would say
the password and we would do like you know some kind of password here and then we don’t have to
specify the interface name on the nested VM because there was only one network device at all
So now I can get out of this awful terminal emulator and just go into Terminator.
Pin to the dash.
Unpin to the dash.
And then I can send a bigger font size.
References.
Profiles.
I’ll just make like a really big font size for the rest of this video.
Oh.
where’s a boon 2 mono
reminder later open to sans mono regular that’s an okay terminal font not the best but okay so
now you can see it’s like a little bit better so what are we doing uh we just proved that this
inner vm can see the internet and it can see the lan but this uh machine can’t really see
can’t really see items on the inside. Let me show you what I’m worried about right now.
If we say IP address and show one of our wireless LANs, oh it’s got this huge name, it’s not WLAN0
like on Raspberry. So this is the wireless adapter that we plugged into the inner VM.
It’s got this IP address that has been given to it automatically from DNS mask.
so that uh or sorry a dhcp server so it’s a something.74 that means now we know what address
it is using so we’ll know what address should probably fail let me just double check this real
fast 5.74 not 1.74 yeah so it’s on the other subnet so we’ll ping 5.74 why is it working
i i pushed a bunch of routes the other day
day. I guess they’re just still in there. Okay. This was the whole surprise. Let me just get rid
of this. Sorry. Uh, sudo IP route delete and then just delete that whole entire thing.
I put a route into my actual router. I thought it wasn’t working though. Maybe it’s actually
Anyway, we’ll talk about that.
So now if we just kind of look at IP routes, now these are like normal routes.
This 123 that’s like for the VM stuff, so it’s fine.
Anyway, if you go back to the ping area, if I hit enter a bunch of times to diagnose the
network, notice how the pings are still showing up for the normal subnet 1.something, but
they’re now no longer showing up for 5.something.
So that’s what was going on before.
I already had the good routes in there.
So now the question is, I mean, if you don’t want to be able to have your normal land machines reach clients behind the access point, then you can just be done with this whole video.
But if you want to be able to reach them, maybe they’re going to be servers.
Maybe you just want to like SSH into them or like access something, you know, access them in some way.
Then you need to be able to reach your machines, right?
So how can we do that?
Well, the first thing that you can do is add a static route.
route so you know what is a route this is not a video about routes it’s basically just a way to
say how do you get to that subnet you get there by making your next hop to this particular ip address
so if i go sudo uh ip route add this is linux you can do the same thing uh basically in like your
router and windows and stuff like that leave a comment if you would like me to make a video for
you know any other topic explaining further if i get enough votes i’ll probably just do it
votes i’ll probably just do it so we’re saying we’re going to add a route that will go to this
new subnet and the way that we get to this new subnet is via this ip address which is on the
current subnet notice how this is dot 1.47 147 was the uh the wireless adapter of the pi
the primary wireless adapter the the internal radio so it’s basically saying if you want to get
to subnet 5.something then you got to first bounce onto the wireless radio of the pi and we know how
of the pi and we know how to get to that because that’s on our normal subnet you don’t have to do a
proto static metric and all that stuff that’ll be filled in later but uh you can specify a device
to hop onto so for this particular machine it’s just basically got ethernet so we can specify
you need to hop out on the ethernet adapter versus like some other adapters that you might have but
I just say to get to that other subnet we’ll just hop on to the pie so now that I added that
notice how right away the other pings start coming back so that’s all we really need to do is just
add that route how do you make that permanent though because this is not going to last after
we reboot this virtual machine so let me delete the route real fast whoa what happened no such
let me just double check here
maybe I can like oh because that extra stuff at the end is not in the route
that I just added so I’m deleting the route notice how these pings suddenly
stop how can I make this persistent well you can go into the settings of your
connection and just specify some routes in there so notice how I’m in a program
called XFCE I’m basically going into the network settings and I’m saying edit
connections if you’re on a different version of Linux or a different network
manager or like Windows or whatever you can just go into the network settings
the wireless settings the Ethernet settings and edit the settings and if
you poke around long enough and look at all the different tabs and things that
are offered you’ll eventually find a place that lets you specify routes notice
on automatic but it’s got a button called routes so if i click on the routes button oh that’s why
it was in there i left it in the actual dialogue so um yeah this is all you need to do you click
the add button and it says what address do you want to uh be able to get to and uh you just type
an address yeah i could have typed dot five dot zero but i chose to type dot five dot one just to
remind myself uh and then the net mask uh usually we’ve been seeing a slash 24 block but that’s the
block but that’s the same thing as this 255.255.255.0 it’s kind of the same meaning they’re just
in different formats i think the format on top is called cidr and i can’t even remember what the one
on the bottom is called i think it’s like just a regular subnet mask or something um so you say
in order to get to that machine the gateway um with this uh mask meaning let’s just get to any
any machine on that particular subnet,
then this is your next hop.
The gateway is the PI’s Wi-Fi adapter
that we assigned earlier.
So when I hit okay,
I should be able to just like disconnect and reconnect
and it should just work.
So again, it’s already working right now,
but the reason it’s always working
is because I had that in there.
So let me just disconnect one more time.
Notice how all the PI’s, sorry, all the pings stop.
stop. What’s going on here? Terminal is frozen. All right. That’s weird. Why isn’t it letting
me get enter? I don’t like it. So then if we just go back to the wired connection, suddenly
everything works all over again. That terminal is just frozen, dude. Okay. Let me just check
my notes real fast. Is there anything else that I needed to talk to you about? Yeah.
Well, I guess one thing I should mention, this is not a video about
administering your actual router, like your primary router. It’s kind of a pain in the butt
to add a static route to every machine that you want to be able to access a client, you know,
on your access point on your new Pi repeater. For me, that’s only like three or four machines. So I
just entered it, it’s fine. But if you want every single machine on your LAN to
on your LAN to always know how to get to clients
behind the access point,
you have to have your router push a static route.
There’s a way to do that actually with your DHCP server.
Some routers have like a nifty interface
that is just called static routes
and you can just start entering them in there.
Some of the routers, you know,
they want you to edit the DHCP server and type like a number
and then like do all these weird conversions
to get like a hexadecimal string.
decimal string. I’m not going to go over that in this video. Just know that you can manually add
static routes here, or perhaps in the future, add static routes at the router level, which will help
all clients. But that’s how you connect. That’s how you do it. Just to prove the point here.
What was the IP address of the client? Right. So like this, yeah, that inner VM, I think it’s on
74 at the very end so I’m on regular LAN right now even though this is a VM it’s actually hooked
up to my regular LAN at least like for the moment I should be able to access it via SSH it’ll say
connection refused if I wasn’t able to access that subnet um it would just
time out or say unreachable or something but it should say connection refused if the SSH server
it might actually try to connect.
Let’s see what happens.
Connection refused.
That means I did make it to the inner VM,
but the SSH server is not on.
So let me just prove this to you a little bit more.
Pseudo apt install, open SSH server.
So when this finishes,
we should be able to connect over SSH
basically finished our wireless repeater only got like three minutes left until the camera cuts me
off again hope you uh learn some stuff let me just try to connect real fast yep see how it’s asking
me now do you recognize this machine so it actually worked so after all of these hours of
watching me just ramble on nonsensically i hope you’ve learned a little bit of stuff and i’ve
now enjoy your new Raspberry Pi Wi Fi repeater. I know I’m
enjoying mine already. I’ll see you in the next video. Don’t
forget to tell your friends and subscribe and do all that fun
stuff. Have a great day you deserve a long hard rest for
rest for watching all this video footage. Okay, I know for me,
I’m so tired and sweaty right now. People at the gym when I go
later are probably going to be like what’s going on with this
dude unless I take a shower before the gym, which doesn’t even
even make sense, but I might do it. So anyway, I’ll see you in the next video. Thank you so much for
watching. Hey everybody. Thanks for watching this video again from the bottom of my heart. I really
appreciate it. I do hope you did learn something and have some fun. If you could do me a please,
a small little favor, could you please subscribe and follow this channel or these videos or whatever
social media website that you’re looking at right now.
It would really mean the world to me
and it’ll help make more videos
and grow this community.
So we’ll be able to do more videos,
longer videos, better videos,
or just I’ll be able to keep making videos in general.
So please do me a kindness and subscribe.
You know, sometimes I’m sleeping in the middle of the night
and I just wake up
because I know somebody subscribed or followed.
It just wakes me up and I get filled with joy.
That’s exactly what happens every single time.
So you could do it as a nice favor to me
as a nice favor to me or you could you control me if you want to just wake me up in the middle
of the night just subscribe and then i’ll i’ll just wake up i promise that’s what will happen
also uh if you look at the middle of the screen right now you should see a qr code which you can
scan in order to go to the website which i think is also named somewhere at the bottom of this video
and it’ll take you to my main website where you can just kind of like see all the videos i published
and the services and tutorials and things that i offer and all that good stuff and uh
if you have a suggestion for uh uh clarifications or errata or just future videos that you want to
see please leave a comment or if you just want to say hey what’s up what’s going on you know just
send me a comment whatever i also wake up for those in the middle of the night i get i wake up
in a cold sweat and i’m like it would really it really mean the world to me i would really
appreciate it so again thank you so much for watching this video and um enjoy the cool music
cool music as I fade into the darkness which is coming for us all.
Thank you.
