I've only just gotten my n810, but so far I've had no luck getting it online at home (worked fine on university wifi).

I've given up on creating an ad-hoc network with my laptop, the laptop just doesn't want to share the connection over wifi it seems. I decided to try a Personal Area Network between the laptop and tablet, and after no luck with the windows vista stack, I installed Dell's WIDCOMM stack for the Truemobile 355 internal BT.

I've installed Maemo-pan and configured it with the laptop's MAC, but when I select "Join a Personal Area Network" on the laptop it only sees my phone, but no n810. If I connect to the Bluetooth-PAN on the tablet it says "Could Not Find SCUBA (ie. the computer name)" and there is no prompt on the laptop.

Does anyone know of anything I could try in order for the n810 to be detected as a PAN device? If I don't have any luck I guess I'll go back to troubleshooting the wifi

Cheers!

i use ad-hoc just fine at home, but my n800 connects to my gateway which runs DHCP and if it can't connect it drops off, so you might have more luck if you ensure that your laptop is set up to be the "master" node in your ad-hoc network if you see what I mean, i.e. enable DHCP daemon

Thanks for the reply. I'm connected to my uni's college network via ethernet, and then can set up ICS between that and the Wireless adapter. Do you mean that I should install a DCHP server, and then create an ad-hoc network for the device to connect to?

I'm not sure if this helps but I tried a similar experiment. I don't even like BT but I wanted to prepare for a possible time I might need to tether to my laptop (I don't own a cell phone). I found that PAN works paired to my Dell Inspiron and the internal 355 BT. We're connecting to the "Network Access" service on the laptop. On the Dell I created a bridge between the BT LAN Access Server Driver and the Ethernet interface that the laptop has LAN access (in this case WiFI, silly but I wanted to make it work WiFI and Ethernet). No MAC addresses to fool with or file edits.

Get paired up with the Dell and then do a Change Connection from the NIT and pick Bluetooth-PAN. At the list choose your laptop which should popup a pairing or authentication screen on the laptop. At this point the WiFI should go off and you are tethered to the laptop via BT. This worked for me.

One caveat on mine is that the NIT will reboot each time I change bewteen BT-PAN and WiFI. I didn't get this working on other PCs but the internal Dell BT seems to work better overall than any other I tried. Did I mention that I hate Bluetooth??

windows ICS creates a dhcp server on the 2ndry interface which would be the wifi ad-hoc interface. however, I don't know whether you can make an ad-hoc wlan interface stay up? all I can suggest is try it.

It is done the other way, your laptop should be the 'pan device', not your tablet, you initiate connection from tablet not from laptop

So unless tablet is configured with wrong bluetooth MAC address of your PC, there is some problem with configuring PAN networking server on your laptop or bluetooth security level is set too high so it doesn't allow unknown devices.

Oh the joyous fun of networking. I tried the bluetooth bridge as suggested by IcelandDreams, but windows wouldn't allow a bridge with the Dell-WIDCOMM stack I'd installed. I went back to the old stack, but then whenever the bridge was created the computer strangely thought the LAN cable was disconnected.

Took speculatrix's advice and went back to creating an ICS'd Ad-hoc wifi network. Despite the n810 being able to see and connect to the wifi, it wasn't receiving an IP, gateway or DNS from the DHCP server.

Finally a breakthrough when I disabled encryption, and created an open ad-hoc network between the two. I thought I'd finally got the IP/DNS settings correct enough to try encryption, but WEP and WPA caused the same issue - the n810 connects to a Link-local IP address, and vista claims that the settings for the wireless network are incorrect. Deleting the network from the Network List, then reading doesn't work, as it claims the password used earlier is now wrong - I guess this is n810 inability to authenticate the network for other devices. After playing around with the settings I was able to get it back onto an unencrypted network.

All in all I'm happy enough to leave it as is, but if I get game later I'll try encryption again - enjoying the net on the n810 to much for the time being.

Thanks everyone for your help!

Double that joy when dealing with Windows networking and/or BT. I'm not liking BT very much at all.
Perhaps Vista has something goofy with making a bridge but it worked on XP. I wanted to avoid any MAC address editing and simply rely on BT authentication and encryption.

Here's my screen chop of the bridge under XP


But as mentioned, the NIT will reboot when I first connect to PAN after being on WiFI but when it comes back up I can get on PAN via the Dell.

I don't know if this is the best way but it works. I still despise bluetooth....