I have home server running the home network.

Connection to the internet is by eth1 (actually a PCI modem card), and the home network is on eth0 (192.168.1.x). iptables, masquerading etc. Dhcp is available on eth0. There are a couple of access points around the house, which obviously transparently relay, so phones etc. can pick up an address and connect to the internet. Works great.

Now I want to put an access point on the server, and I want it to look like yet another access point. The server ap is wlan0. How? I have a feeling I should be bridging between wlan0 and eth0, but the examples given are effectively bridging between the internet (eth1) and wlan0.

Your comments would be appreciated

Paul

Take a look at hostapd, your wireless adapter must support master mode.

Bridging wlan0 and eth0 would allow them to be on the same subnet.

Thanks Michael

No problem with hostapd (eventually I found an adapter capable of acting as an access point!) I can see the access point and attach, but obviously can't get an ip address yet. So that bit works.

So...if I allocate an address for wlan0 in the same subnet as eth1, and bridge, will I be able to use both at the same time? I'm very nervous about locking myself out. Should I tell dhcpd to allow requests from br0 or eth1 and wlan0? How about iptables, should I replace all references to eth1 with br0?

Essentially the examples always given are sort of like connecting a wire between two physical ports. I want to connect two ports in parallel.

Paul

Not much experience with bridging but yes you want to use br0 in place of wlan0, eth0 and dhcp

Great - works well (with one oddity) I'll come on to that. I changed the 'home network port' in iptables from eth0 to br0 in iptables and my firewall is happy.

But, have the line

bridge_ports wlan0 eth0

in my /etc/network/interface file (this is a debian system). However the bridge is formed with only eth0. I can manually add wlan using addif, and then it's fine.

I guess I can close this now, with only the puzzling failure of wlan0 to join the bridge. The /etc/network/interfaces file brings up the bridge and adds eth0, but I had to add wlan0 automatically/manually with an entry in rc.local. The bridge_waitport parameter either doesn`t work, or doesn`t help in this case. In addition I needed to allow forwarding between the bridge components in iptables.