How to setup a wireless access point

From Alpine Linux

This material is work-in-progress ... Do not follow instructions here until this notice is removed. (Last edited by Dubiousjim on 12 Mar 2012.)

Contents 1 Install needed packages 2 Check that card is detected 3 Setup Bridge 4 Setup Encryption 5 Setup hostapd 6 Associate clients

Install needed packages

apk add hostapd wireless-tools wpa_supplicant

Check that card is detected

Cat /proc/net/dev and see which cards are detected. If no cards are available, check what driver the card uses and modprobe it. Check that the card is in master mode.

Setup Bridge

This material is proposed for merging ... It should be merged with How to configure a network bridge. See also the discussion of bonding, vlans, and bridges on http://lists.alpinelinux.org/alpine-devel between 9 Mar and 23 Mar 2012 (Discuss)

apk add bridge-utils

vi /etc/network/interfaces

auto br0
iface br0 inet static
pre-up brctl addbr br0
pre-up echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/bridge/bridge-nf-call-arptables
pre-up echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/bridge/bridge-nf-call-iptables
pre-up echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/bridge/bridge-nf-call-ip6tables
address 192.168.0.253
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.0.254
post-down brctl delbr br0

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet manual
up ip link set $IFACE up
up brctl addif br0 $IFACE
down brctl delif br0 $IFACE || true
down ip link set $IFACE down

auto eth1
iface eth1 inet manual
up ip link set $IFACE up
up brctl addif br0 $IFACE
down brctl delif br0 $IFACE || true
down ip link set $IFACE down
...

That way you create br0 with: ifup br0, and you can add/remove individual interfaces to the bridge with ifup eth0, ifdown eth0.

Setup Encryption

Edit /etc/hostapd/hostapd.wpa_psk and insert the following, replacing PASSPHRASE with the WPA_PSK key you would like to use (remove keys that you don't want to use):

00:00:00:00:00:00 PASSPHRASE

Setup hostapd

Edit /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf and replace entries that need to be such as interface, bridge, driver, ssid, etc. Example file below:

interface=wlan0
bridge=br0
driver=hostap
logger_syslog=-1
logger_syslog_level=2
logger_stdout=-1
logger_stdout_level=2
debug=0
dump_file=/tmp/hostapd.dump
ctrl_interface=/var/run/hostapd
ctrl_interface_group=0
ssid=SecureSSID
#macaddr_acl=1
#accept_mac_file=/etc/hostapd/accept
auth_algs=3
eapol_key_index_workaround=0
eap_server=0
wpa=3
wpa_psk_file=/etc/hostapd/hostapd.wpa_psk
wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
wpa_pairwise=CCMP

If you wish to use MAC address filtering, uncomment the lines starting with macaddr_acl and accept_mac_file, create /etc/hostapd/accept (with 600 permissions) and add the allowed clients' MAC address to the file.

Start hostapd.

/etc/init.d/hostapd start

Associate clients

Associate a few different clients to test.