Raspi As A Wifi Router

Tons of hacks going around these days about setting your raspberry pi as a wifi router. But the difficulty is, there’s no plug and play solution. It all depends on your wifi dongle, version of raspbian, etc.

Doing this with the intention of completing this article: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-make-a-wifi-network-that-only-transmits-cat-pictures-with-a-raspberry-pi/

I’m gonna write about what worked for me. First off I’m using an edimax dongle. It’s cheap and easy, except they say you can’t become an access point with it.

Wrong.

Ok let’s get started. First off follow the directions here: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/build-your-own-safeplug-tor-proxy-box/ until you get to the line where you actually test to see if it worked. this line:

sudo /usr/sbin/hostapd /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf

It will fail, giving you an error about “nl80211”. That’s ok, we just don’t have the drivers we need for edimax. This is because they actually have a version of hostapd they want you to use instead. There’s a precompiled app here: http://www.daveconroy.com/turn-your-raspberry-pi-into-a-wifi-hotspot-with-edimax-nano-usb-ew-7811un-rtl8188cus-chipset/. Here’s what you do:

wget http://www.daveconroy.com/wp3/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/hostapd.zip
unzip hostapd.zip
sudo mv /usr/sbin/hostapd /usr/sbin/hostapd.bak
sudo mv hostapd /usr/sbin/hostapd.edimax
sudo ln -sf /usr/sbin/hostapd.edimax /usr/sbin/hostapd
sudo chown root.root /usr/sbin/hostapd
sudo chmod 755 /usr/sbin/hostapd

Now we have hostapd with the correct driver. Let’s update our hostapd config file:

sudo pico /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf

 

Comment the old drive line and add in the new one, should look like this:

#driver=nl80211
driver=rtl871xdrv

Now restart your pi:

sudo reboot

When you get back in, let’s test the wifi before we add it to services:

sudo /usr/sbin/hostapd /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf

If that worked, you’re all set, you should be able to connection to a network name “PiTest” or whatever you changed the ssid to be. If everything is grand, let’s make it permanent by adding to our services and start on boot.

sudo service hostapd start
sudo service isc-dhcp-server start
sudo update-rc.d hostapd enable
sudo update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server enable

I’ve also uploaded an exact copy of the pi image with this setup here: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/iwearshorts-pi-images/pi-wifi.img

Just in case you don’t feel like mucking around with it… 🙂

The resources I used to get this going:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/build-your-own-safeplug-tor-proxy-box/

http://www.daveconroy.com/turn-your-raspberry-pi-into-a-wifi-hotspot-with-edimax-nano-usb-ew-7811un-rtl8188cus-chipset/

http://sirlagz.net/2013/02/10/how-to-use-the-raspberry-pi-as-a-wireless-access-pointrouter-part-3b/

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=16849

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=63048

 

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