Below you may find a quick recipe to turn a computer running Linux equipped with an Atheros-based WiFi card into a WiFi access point with WPA2-PSK security.
It is a slightly modified configuration presented on Radek Karpowicz’s blog. In particular, I needed to add the line responsible for not caching MAC adresses (brctl setageing br0 0) to achieve correct behavior. Without it the “AP” acted weird, i.e. for some time everything was working fine and then the WiFi-connected hosts couldn’t reach the rest of the network – the only solution (an unacceptable one of course in the longer perspective) was to ping any LAN address directly from the “AP”. I don’t know, maybe I don’t understand something, maybe I have misconfigured something or maybe it’s simply some error in hostapd or the madwifi drivers. All in all, I haven’t came across similar problems since adding that line to the script.
hostapd.conf:interface=ath0 bridge=br0 driver=madwifi # show verbose output logger_syslog=-1 logger_syslog_level=2 logger_stdout=-1 logger_stdout_level=2 debug=4 dump_file=/tmp/hostapd.dump ctrl_interface=/var/run/hostapd ctrl_interface_group=0 ssid=OurSSID eapol_key_index_workaround=0 eap_server=0 wpa=2 wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK wpa_pairwise=CCMP wpa_passphrase=ourPreSharedKeyap-init.sh:wlanconfig ath0 destroy wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode ap iwconfig ath0 channel channel_number brctl addbr br0 brctl addif br0 ath0 brctl addif br0 eth0 brctl setageing br0 0 ifconfig ath0 0.0.0.0 ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 ifconfig br0 IP_address hostapd hostapd.conf
/var/log/kempniu 