My house has standard broadband internet. A coaxial cable comes into the house from the road. Attached to this is a wireless router.
My room is right at the other end of the house. I can only get a decent signal by putting a USB Wi-Fi dongle out of one window.
As I have a spare old MacBook, I'm attaching the dongle via a 3m USB extension cable, and putting it out of the window.
I am then configuring this old MacBook to redistribute the Internet, using its internal Wi-Fi card, i.e. the airport.
Other devices can see this new Wi-Fi spot and connect to it. Primarily my new MacBook Air.
But trying on the browser, it fails to load a webpage. 'ping' from the command line fails to resolve www.google.com.
Now here is the weird thing. It has been working on occasion. I don't know if it's the result of my fiddling around.
I've tried quite a few things: I've tried using Bluetooth to redistribute. I've tried setting the IP address for the airport manually. I've tried altering the channel. Probably a few more but I'm not comfortable thrashing around not knowing what I'm doing with no clear gameplan.
Could someone please give me a sequence of moves to tackle this?