Hi

After googling, nobody seems to know what wmaster0 is. It shows up parallel to the wireless interface (in my case wlan0) in newer kernels, but the majority of users don't seem to know anything about it.

I am looking to build a linux wireless access point and have so far found it a very painful scarcely documented road. Wmaster0 would be exactly what I need (since you usually can never set the wlan0 interfaces to master mode)

What thing has generated this wmaster0? Where does it come from?

Markus

wmaster0 is an internal-use interface for mac80211, a Linux WiFi API. Drivers that are built on mac80211 will display this interface in addition to the actual WLAN device's interface name.

It doesn't mean the device can do master mode however, and there is no reason or need to deal with wmaster0 directly. My understanding is that this interface might even be hidden later on as development progresses.

As for setting up a Linux AP, there is very little to document. You just put the device into master mode, setup TCP/IP, and bridge it to another interface that connects to the destination network (usually, the Internet). Getting a device that supports master mode is the hardest part, after that you are talking about just a few commands really.

Thanks for bringing some light into the case.

Yes, I thought that putting a device into master mode was so easy, but so far I have not come across one single interface that accepts this via iwconfig.

Knowing that you need special tools for it, depending on the driver is a thing that I just learned, since it was not obvious.
The hardest thing so far for me was to find out which driver is for which wireless card. So far, I have not found out which driver hostap is supposed to use for my hermes orinoco or intel wireless adapter, all fail. Nobody talk about if wireless firmwares are necessary and where one can get them.

at the moment, I thirst for a GUI or frontend for hostap, but fear that there might be none under the sun.

The bridging and tcp/ip config is easy, but the wireless driver stuff is tough like nails, at least for me. Usually the problem turns out to know where up and down is, where to even try to solve a problem.

But thanks for the pointers.

Markus

To be more concrete about my problem:

I got a laptop with a intel wirelesscard:


Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron]

the module is called iwl4965

setting it to master mode with iwconfig fails.

Which driver (if any) should I use with hostap? I found no documentation about it.

Markus

If you can't set the device into master mode with iwconfig, it isn't going to work with anything else. hostapd is simply a daemon that controls functions necessary to use a WLAN device as a fully functional AP, it doesn't give the device any capability it didn't already have. If the drivers for the device don't support master mode, there is nothing hostapd can do about it.

There is some confusion here, as hostapd and hostap are two different things. Hostapd is the control daemon that works with multiple wireless drivers (but again, only those that already support master mode), while hostap is a driver for Prism-based WLAN devices (which can also be used with hostapd).