From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Mark Schloesser Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:23:30 +0100 Subject: [ath9k-devel] multiple APs Message-ID: <49709862.3070405@etcho.de> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: ath9k-devel@lists.ath9k.org Hi ath9k-devel, we are currently playing around with some ath9k + hostapd setups at university for testing purposes. I already have a working WPA2 installation by now but as i am fairly new to the linux based access point world there are some problems I am facing. Also the surroundings of wireless drivers and applications seem to be changing and evolving in the kernel world right now - so it's even more difficult for me to find the solutions and best practices for our research. So I hope I am in the right place to ask some questions and get some help or directions :) I am using a Ubuntu amd64 installation on the machines here and we have D-Link DWA-556 wireless cards in each of those. To get the setup working I used the compat-wireless modules and compiled hostapd from svn trunk. So hostapd is using the nl80211 driver backend (libnl). I configured hostapd, fired it up using wlan0, set up some dhcp server and by then had a working wpa2 access point. Now... If i understand this correctly the atheros cards (old madwifi driver and also ath5k/ath9k) are able to bring up multiple interfaces so you can serve as AP and be a client station in parallel - or even could serve two access points at the same time - one with WPA2 and one with WEP. When I tried this I ran into a quite strange situation. I created a new device in station mode and a second hostapd configuration that uses this interface. At first I was able to bring up a second hostapd instance and I even was able to see the wpa2 and wep networks on another machine but I could not associate and also the hostapds were printing messages like crazy. I tried to reload the modules (ath9k and the 80211 ones) - and now trying to bring up the second device i first got a network name conflict due to the same mac address. I changed the mac address and now get "No buffer space available" when I try to bring it up. So my question is if I am totally doing anything wrong here? And also perhaps someone could clarify the status of the drivers capabilites as I am really confused by the ath9k documentation site and some mailing-lists / webpages I stumbled upon during my research. Another thing: Is there some possibility to make another machine with ath9k card "repeat" the signal - like using WDS or some other method - how is the state there? I also tried to revert to using madwifi as it also supports our cards - but I was not able to bring up an accesspoint there. Would it even be the way to go - as it is more stable perhaps? Or should ath9k be okay? I would be thankful for any hints! Cheers, Mark