OK.
I think we need to go back to first principles.
An IP address is not a property of a computer. It's a property of a network interface.
A network scanner will only scan the subnet (address range) you told it to. From what you have said, you're only scanning your WiFi network's subnet so will only see machines/addresses within that subnet.
If you login to your Pi and run either of the following commands you can see what interfaces it has and what their IP addresses currently are:You should see three interfaces: lo, eth0, and wlan0.
lo is the loopback (i.e. only purely local to the Pi traffic) and usually has an address of 127.0.0.1
eth0 is your ethernet interface and should have an IP address in 192.168.137.X range assigned from ICS on your laptop.
wlan0 is your WiFi interface. It's IP address will have come from your router.
Bearing in mind I've not used ICS for a while, yes if you share the laptop's WiFi the Pi on the ethernet interface will be able to access the internet through whatever WiFi network the laptop is connected to. Even if that isn't always the same network.
Where thing will get confusing, both for you and your computers, is where your Pi is connected to both your WiFi and ICS on your laptop.
If you try to connect to raspberrypi (or whatever your Pi's hostname is) you have no idea which address that gets converted to and, therefore, which network the traffic goes over. Same when trying to reach local or internet sites from the Pi.
This is why I suggested you use the Pi's IP address rather than its hostname. That way you know and can control which interface (and network) gets used.
Having the Pi's WiFi, the Pi's ethernet, the laptop's ethernet, and the laptop's WiFi all with addresses in the same subnet (e.g. 192.168.88.1, 192.168.88.2, 192.168.88.3, 192.168.88.4) has a good chance of breaking networking on both computers. The comptuer in question won't know which interface to send the traffic by so may pick the wrong one.
For example, if you have a server on your network at 192.168.88.254 (e.g. your DNS server) if the packet goes out on the laptop's ethernet it has no way to reach the server as it can only be reached via the WiFi interface. And ethernet usually has a higher priority (because it's faster) than WiFi.
Of course, using ICS avoids this.
I think we need to go back to first principles.
An IP address is not a property of a computer. It's a property of a network interface.
A network scanner will only scan the subnet (address range) you told it to. From what you have said, you're only scanning your WiFi network's subnet so will only see machines/addresses within that subnet.
If you login to your Pi and run either of the following commands you can see what interfaces it has and what their IP addresses currently are:
Code:
ip aifconfig -alo is the loopback (i.e. only purely local to the Pi traffic) and usually has an address of 127.0.0.1
eth0 is your ethernet interface and should have an IP address in 192.168.137.X range assigned from ICS on your laptop.
wlan0 is your WiFi interface. It's IP address will have come from your router.
Bearing in mind I've not used ICS for a while, yes if you share the laptop's WiFi the Pi on the ethernet interface will be able to access the internet through whatever WiFi network the laptop is connected to. Even if that isn't always the same network.
Where thing will get confusing, both for you and your computers, is where your Pi is connected to both your WiFi and ICS on your laptop.
If you try to connect to raspberrypi (or whatever your Pi's hostname is) you have no idea which address that gets converted to and, therefore, which network the traffic goes over. Same when trying to reach local or internet sites from the Pi.
This is why I suggested you use the Pi's IP address rather than its hostname. That way you know and can control which interface (and network) gets used.
Having the Pi's WiFi, the Pi's ethernet, the laptop's ethernet, and the laptop's WiFi all with addresses in the same subnet (e.g. 192.168.88.1, 192.168.88.2, 192.168.88.3, 192.168.88.4) has a good chance of breaking networking on both computers. The comptuer in question won't know which interface to send the traffic by so may pick the wrong one.
For example, if you have a server on your network at 192.168.88.254 (e.g. your DNS server) if the packet goes out on the laptop's ethernet it has no way to reach the server as it can only be reached via the WiFi interface. And ethernet usually has a higher priority (because it's faster) than WiFi.
Of course, using ICS avoids this.
Statistics: Posted by thagrol — Tue Jan 27, 2026 8:46 pm