** Quick Tip For The QuickLinks **

If you want a wifi router, ignore Part 2, and go from this part straight to Part 3. Need internet access ? Part 2 or 3 is the go depending on your need 🙂

QuickLinks:

Part 2 – How to make your RPi into a Wireless Access Point

Part 3 – How to make your RPi into a Router

Also if you are using a RTL8188CUS based device check this forum thread

** Update – 2012-11-10 **

Looks like the newest version of the Raspbian distro adds an extra line to /etc/network/interfaces which needs to be removed or commented out.

The line is wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Thanks to hunternet93

** Update – 2016-11-06 **

As requested, I’ve added some information from the comments – courtesy of Jakimfett

To find out what driver your USB WiFi stick uses, you can use lshw -C network to find out. The driver info is shown under the configuration section. If lshw is not installed, you can install it via apt-get – apt-get install lshw

** Original Post Starts Here **

I recently bought a Wifi dongle for my Raspberry Pi – A Ralink RT5370.

While I was poking around, I noticed that the USB dongle could act as an Access Point.

I haven’t tried with any others, but the way I found out about mine is by using the iw utility.

Running iw list spat out a list of abilities.

This was a part of the list

Supported interface modes:

* IBSS

* managed

* AP

* AP/VLAN

* WDS

* monitor

* mesh point



So I decided to try it out.

I installed hostapd so that I could run an access point off the Raspberry Pi.

apt-get install hostapd

After I installed hostapd, I had to modify a few files before hostapd would run.

Before I go modifying the files though, I need to give my WiFi adapter a static IP address.

In /etc/network/ there is a file called interfaces. This file contains the details for the network adapters.

I have the lines below in order to set a static IP address.



iface wlan0 inet static

address 10.0.0.1

netmask 255.255.255.0



Now, we need to edit some files.

First up, I had to modify /etc/default/hostapd. The DAEMON_CONF variable was not configured, so I pointed it to a configuration file that I was about to create.

DAEMON_CONF="/etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf"

After that, I created the configuration file in the location specified.

In the configuration file, I specified the following parameters



# First we configure the interface we'll be listening on

interface=wlan0 # The interface to listen on

driver=nl80211

# The driver that is being used by the WiFi adapter, this could be different for everyone

ctrl_interface=/var/run/hostapd

ctrl_interface_group=0 # These 2 are just parameters so that the hostap daemon runs.



# Now onto the important WiFi configuration

ssid=RaspAP

# First up, the SSID or Network name. This is what other devices will see when they try to connect.

hw_mode=g

# I'm setting this to Wireless G mode. A, B, and G are available here.

channel=8

# This is setting the channel that the WiFi is on, valid channels are from 1-11, or 1-14 depending on location.

# Wifi Security Settings

wpa=2 # This sets the security settings to WPA2

wpa_psk=928519398acf811e96f5dcac68a11d6aa876140599be3dd49612e760a2aaac0e

# The line above sets the wpa passphrase to "raspiwlan", this is obtained via the wpa_passphrase command.

# However, you can also set a passphrase like the line below.

#wpa_passphrase=raspiwlan

wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK

wpa_pairwise=CCMP

rsn_pairwise=CCMP

# I've set these to WPA-PSK to indicate that we are using a Pre-Shared Key with CCMP encryption.

# Otherwise, hostapd also has a built in RADIUS server that we can use for authentcation

# But I'll leave that to another post.

# Other settings

beacon_int=100 # This sets how often the WiFi will send a beacon out.

auth_algs=3

wmm_enabled=1



** Note ** You may need to strip out all the comments when you save your configuration file as hostapd does not have consistent comment handling.

With the above configuration file saved, I downloaded dnsmasq in order to give my Raspberry Pi the ability to hand out IP addresses to clients that connected to the RaspAP.

apt-get install dnsmasq

For now, we’ll only do a base configuration of dnsmasq, just enough for it to hand out IP addresses so we can test out our new RasAP.



interface=wlan0 # To get dnsmasq to listen only on wlan0.

dhcp-range=10.0.0.2,10.0.0.5,255.255.255.0,12h # This sets the available range from 10.0.0.2 to 10.0.0.5

# It also sets the subnet mask to 255.255.255.0 and specifies a lease time of 12 hours.



After the configuration file has been created in /etc/dnsmasq.conf, start up hostapd and restart dnsmasq.

You should now be able to see the WiFi network “RaspAP” and be able to connect to it and get an IP address.

In the next post, we will turn the Raspberry Pi into a bridge so that it can act as a wireless access point.

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