You’ve most likely found yourself in situations where you needed
internet on your computer but had no WiFi network close-by. What do
you do? Fire up a hotspot from your smartphone and share its internet
connection with the laptop. The technical term for sharing a phone’s
internet connection with another device — be it over WiFi,
Bluetooth or USB — is tethering.
Recently, however, I found myself in the opposite position: I had
internet on my laptop but not on my phone! Reverse tethering to the
rescue!
After I replaced my old smartphone, which hasn’t been receiving
Lineage OS security updates for a long time anymore, I was looking for
good uses for the device. Given it’s age, looks, and lack of software
updates, selling it would have been a challenge. Porting postmarketOS
onto it would have been interesting, but realistically I lack time
(and skill?) for that. Throwing a working device away was definitely
not an option; but just having it lying around also felt wasteful.
In an ever more globalized world where people become increasingly
mobile, it is likely that you have friends whom you can’t meet easily
because they live far away from you. At times you might not even be
allowed to meet with people who live close by, as we’ve all
experienced in the recent past …