Re: statically address wifi interface without an SSID

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2016-04-04 at 14:07 -0500, Matt Zagrabelny wrote:
> Hey Dan,
>
> On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 1:54 PM, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2016-04-04 at 11:47 -0500, Matt Zagrabelny wrote:
> > > Greetings,
> > >
> > > I have an rpi2 with two USB wifi dongles. One dongle I use to
> > > connect
> > > to whatever wifi network I'm around. This works great. Thanks NM!
> > >
> > > The other wifi dongle I'm using with hostapd.
> > >
> > > I'd love for NM to be able to statically address this interface
> > > without needing to assign it an SSID - since the interface is
> > > running
> > > in master mode.
> > >
> > > Does anyone know if this is possible? Perhaps by manually
> > > tweaking
> > > files in /etc/NetworkManager?
> > NM can use wpa_supplicant's lightweight AP mode to do most of what
> > hostapd does, if you don't need extensive features like 802.1x/EAP.
> >  Perhaps that could work instead of hostapd?
> And it is configured via the "hotspot" option in NM?
>
> Does it handle DHCP or do I need to run that separately? Currently
> using udhcpd.

Yes.  First select "Hotspot" (AP) mode in nm-connection-editor and
assign the SSID.  Now you have a choice of IP addressing; you can
either assign whatever static address you want and use your own DHCP,
DNS forwarding, and routing rules.

Or you can choose "Shared" which tells NM to start dnsmasq as a DHCP
server and DNS forwarder, and to set up iptables NAT rules to ensure
traffic from the wifi interface is routed to whatever your actual
network connection is.  You can also add an IP address to the
connection and NM will assign that IP to your AP-mode interface,
reserve a couple IPs for static services that you might want to use
(printers, file servers, etc) and use the rest of the subnet for DHCP.
 If you don't manually specify an IP address for the AP interface, NM
will use 10.42.43.1/24.

Dan