Thursday, May 03, 2007

Creating a Wireless Accesspoint in Five Simple Steps

If u wanted to create a simple accesspoint to make ur own accesspoint-based wireless network for watever purpose then this is for u...however by no means accesspoints are the only way to make wireless networks, an ad-hoc network is a wireless network that doesnt have a central accesspoint but is based on a peer-to-peer communication...

Creating the AP can be done on different OSs, on the linux side where this task is more reliable and widespread...i will discuss the madwifi (madwifi.org) way which should work for almost at atheros-chipset based wireless NIC...u can check ur card at madwifi's website (http://madwifi.org/wiki/Compatibility) and see whether it works well (or at all) with this driver.

1. U first have to install madwifi NG on ur favourite linux distro, which might require installing the build headers and kernel/modules headers, ie. read ur distros docs...
2. Then if u dont restart ur system then u'd have to load the modue (fdshe# insmod ath_pci) as root ofcourse...(actually, everything from hereafter is done as root)
3. u can create mutliple instances of ur physical card (NIC)..not more than one can be a client, and the other can be an accesspoint but this seemed unstable for me, therefore one instance per NIC is used here...to destroy an instance (ath0, ath1, ath2 ...etc) type
fdshe# wlanconfig ath0 destroy
4. to create a new instance type
fdshe# wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode ap
this will create an AP...u could set bssid by appending bssid ((watever bssid u want)), u can also set whether u want the AP to beacon or not.
5. u can set the ssid by iwconfig ath0 essid "ur essid"
ofcourse ur access point must have an address this can be done by ifconfig ath0 192.168.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 (or watever u choose it to be)
now u can connect to this network from ur clients...

* u can see ur connected clients using the command
fdshe# wlanconfig ath0 list
if u want to specify wat type of band ur ap should use u can use the iwpriv command in the following manner:
fdshe# iwpriv ath0 mode 1 for 802.11a
fdshe# iwpriv ath0 mode 2 for 802.11b
fdshe# iwpriv ath0 mode 3 for 802.11g
fdshe# iwpriv ath0 mode 0 autoselect 802.11a/b/g (default)

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