Re: Wifi sharing

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2012-11-27 at 22:37 +0100, Michael Below wrote:
> Sorry, too much traffic for me, unsubscribing. I'd be happy if you
> contact me off-list about the Wifi sharing functionality.
> 
> (So far I haven't found a single person successfully using
> networkmanager for wifi sharing, so something like "yes, I have managed
> to configure an access point" would be a fine start...)

Full AP-mode (ie, Infrastructure) support was added after NetworkManager
0.9.6 and will be in the next release.  It also requires a reasonably
new version of wpa_supplicant, at least anything 1.0 or later should
work.

NetworkManager 0.9.6 and earlier only support ad-hoc mode "hotspot"
functionality, and WPA is disabled here because there are kernel driver
bugs that make your supposedly ad-hoc WPA hotspot actually be created as
an open/unencrypted hotspot, which isn't cool.  Thus only open and WEP
are supported.

There's ongoing work to also add RSN IBSS (ie, WPA2 Ad-Hoc) support for
hotspots in NetworkManager, which is useful if your hardware doesn't
support full AP mode which even a lot of recent cards don't.  That has
yet to land.

Dan

> Am Sonntag, den 25.11.2012, 16:44 +0100 schrieb Michael Below:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I would like to use networkmanager for Wifi sharing. The situation:
> > 
> > I have a Debian testing AMD64 system, connected to the LAN, with an
> > additional D-Link System AirPlus G DWL-G122 Wireless Adapter(rev.C1)
> > [Ralink RT2571W] I want to use to occasionally provide Wifi for some
> > devices.
> > 
> > After trying this with networkmanager unsuccessfully for a first time, I
> > set up an access point using hostapd. This works fine in general, but
> > the GNOME apps like evolution, pidgin etc. believe the network is down,
> > so they don't connect to the network. Probably they ask networkmanager
> > for the status of eth0, which isn't up. I didn't find a way to tell
> > networkmanager to look for br0 instead.
> > 
> > Now I tried setting it up again with networkmanager. The trouble starts
> > in the basic setup: networkmanager doesn't remember my settings. I want
> > Infrastructure mode with WPA, not Ad hoc mode with WEP. Basically, I
> > just want networkmanager to do it like I set it up with hostapd.
> > networkmanager shouldn't forget my settings every time I disable the
> > network.
> > 
> > The networkmanager packages are version 0.9.4
> > 
> > Is there a way to use networkmanager for Wifi sharing? Either to get it
> > to notice that br0 is there, or to have it setup a stable access point
> > of its own? 
> > 
> > Cheers
> > 
> > Michael
> > 
> 
>