I'm looking for a way to directly connect my Windows 7 laptop and my headless Ubuntu 10.04 server. (Desktop edition is installed, for my own reasons.) I have a regular Ethernet cable. My problem is that I keep trying to use Windows Backup to a shared folder on Ubuntu, but the wifi connection keeps dropping intermittently for all my devices at the same time before the backup completes. I want to use the cable to connect the two computers directly, independent of whether or not they're connected to wifi. This will create a much more reliable connection, and it will allow the backup to complete without worrying about the wifi dropping.
It would be best if I could create this connection using an ad-hoc network (or similar) on Windows 7 without touching the configuration on the Ubuntu server, as the server has no input devices or displays connected to it. I mostly access it through SSH and sometimes VNC, and if the connection is lost, the only thing I can do to get it back is a hard reboot.
So the current configuration is this:
Windows 7-------wireless-----\
\
Wifi router
/
Ubuntu 10.04----wireless-----/
But I want it to be like this:
Windows 7-------wireless-----\
| \
|cable Wifi router
| /
Ubuntu 10.04----wireless-----/