Last weekend there was an electrical storm which took out my wireless access point. My Ubuntu desktop PC is wired and also has a wireless card, so today I set my mind to a temporary wifi solution until I get a new AP.
The Basic Setup
In order to use my wireless card in master mode (that is, as an access point), I needed to use hostapd. In order to bridge the wireless interface to the LAN, I needed to install bridge-utils. Both of those things are in the Ubuntu repositories:
$ sudo apt-get install hostapd bridge-utils
My hostapd config file looks like this (with the SSID and passphrase not included):
interface=wlan0 driver=nl80211 ssid=[MySSID] hw_mode=g channel=11 wpa=1 wpa_passphrase=[MyPassphrase] wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK wpa_pairwise=TKIP CCMP wpa_ptk_rekey=600 bridge=br0
For this to work though, the interface br0 needs to be set up. You can set this up in /etc/network/interfaces, but since this is a short-term fix, I chose to just do it manually from a script.
# Add bridge interface and add eth0 to it. brctl addbr br0 brctl addif br0 eth0 # Start the wireless gateway hostapd hostapd.wlan0.conf
The Catch
The setup above made the wireless work fine for me, but it meant that my desktop couldn’t access the network itself. After much hunting around, I figured out that I had to remove the IP addresses and routes from eth0 and add them to br0 for this to work. This article that pointed me in the right direction.
My final script is:
#!/bin/bash # Add bridge interface and add eth0 to it. brctl addbr br0 brctl addif br0 eth0 # Remove IP address from eth0, add a static one to br0 ip addr flush dev eth0 ip addr add 192.168.1.188/19 dev br0 # Bring the interface up and set the gateway. ifconfig br0 up ip route add default via 192.168.0.254 # Start the wireless gateway hostapd hostapd.wlan0.conf
Now as long as my desktop is switched on and running this script, I have WiFi access to my network.