I've been using Slack in product for a long time but this new request has me stumped. They say we need to talk to the remote devices (an LED array display and green/red/yellow light stack) by wireless to become more modern. The hardware guy uses a TI 430 in the peripherals so uses a Lantronix module that has a built in TCP stack since the 430 is bare metal - no OS. I figured we could use ad hoc or peer to peer, but he says the Lantronix device takes an unacceptably long time to connect in that case. So I am supposed to act as an "access point" except my app will be the one talking to the peripherals, not just forwarding packets from a wireless net to a wired one. Two days of surfing has left me confused. Do I need wpa_supplicant and hostapd together? Just hostapd? Or wpa_supplicant has an AP mode? Some use bridges, some don't. It seems to me like forwarding should work without a bridge. Do I need to use NAT although the host and peripherals will be on a common subnet? I probably need iptables to keep wireless packets from spilling onto the wired network. What do I do? Route wireless packets to lo where my app can get/put them? Can I get/put packets to eth0 even if there is no cable connected? Or am I over thinking this? Will wlan0 be available to me running hostapd or wpa_supplicant in AP mode? Help!!

I set up hostapd on Slackware earlier this year, so perhaps some of this thread will help.

Some time ago Alan Cox pointed me to this page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...e_access_point

I use create_ap and haveget. The only difference with the article in my case is the way to handle NetworkManager to temporary free the NIC. Do not edit any NetworkManager conf file.

#nmcli nm wifi off
#rfkill unblock wlan
#sleep 5
#create_ap ...

Since my laptop has a hardware button for WiFi, there is no need then to use something like
"#nmcli nm wifi on" afterthat.

Thanks. I had seen that one.

I can't really use NetworkManager or WICD as this box is headless running without X. It is essentially an embedded device. I looked at create_ap, but it is too opaque. I need to understand what is going on. I found this http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/li...ncrypthostapd/ which cleared up some things. But the powers-that-be decided that since we have to buy a USB wifi dongle anyway, maybe we should just use an external AP.