Bridging a Phone Hotspot into LAN

[FifeingEejit]

Right, someone drove a bus into the Openreach cabinet at home and even though it'll be slow I need some sort of internet for basic stuff like the heating thermostat and turning things on and off...

I have
A couple of wired switches
A bunch of IoS sockets
A bunch of wireless networks on a Netgear WAP
A vodafone router connected to the duff telephone system
A NUC with wifi and Windows 10
A PC with wired connection only

I also have a mobile phone that connects very slowly to the now overloaded O2/Vodafone mast down the road.

In theory I should be able to fire up the personal hotspot on my phone, connect the NUC to it and bridge the WiFi network to the other networks.
Except I've completely forgotten how to do this sort of shit
I used to use an old PC with Smoothwall for something similar to this when ADSL came with singel PC USB modems

Anyone able to give any hints (as usual I think i'm getting my terminology wrong and thus google/bing/chatGPT are scunnered)

[Kim]

I think the spiritual successor to Smoothwall would be pfSense or OPNsense.

I suppose your likely approaches are either to NAT everything with one of those and use a WiFi connection to the phone as the WAN (which would be closer to what the usual tutorials would be set up for), or set it up as a layer 2 bridge (presuming it can do this) and let the phone handle the DHCP and stuff (which might bring you up against a limit to the number of devices it can support).


(Important lesson on why you want your internet-of-shit devices to work properly without a connection to the outside internet.)

[FifeingEejit]

IoS yes the problem seems to be tplink do a range that do work (kasa) and ones that don't (not kasa) and finding this out now is shit

I've been offered a shot of a mates lte router and sim card so I shouldnt need to do much more than just plug it in

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[Kim]

I've been offered a shot of a mates lte router and sim card so I shouldnt need to do much more than just plug it in

Yes, my solution for this eventuality is an industrial LTE modem with an Ethernet port, which Just Works in much the same way as a DSL/cable modem or fibre ONT without any fucking about with WiFi.  Plugs into pfSense as a second WAN.  (Dual-WAN configuration left as an exercise for the reader, I've never come up with a satisfactory automated solution, but that's mostly because of trying to make use of AAISP's backup L2TP service, which unhelpfully breaks the primary connection's routing when brought up.)

My IoS devices operate in an isolated VLAN with no internet access as a matter of course, which rules out about 95% of commercial products, but means they don't care if the internet connection goes down.  (The MQTT server and firewall are still single points of failure, unfortunately.)

[FifeingEejit]

My thought on WAN switch over is the MK 1 switch

Except I didn't stretch to MK kit when getting those sockets installed

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