Our beachhouse for the week was advertised as having an Internet connection, so I was looking forward to being able to do some blogging while I’m here in addition to checking out the area’s attractions. It turns out the Internet connection advertised consisted of one wired connection to a dead cable modem. WiFi would have been great, but having no connection whatsoever simply burned me up.
I called the management office on Monday, Tuesday (twice), and today in order to get someone to fix this broken cable modem. As we walked off the beach today at 3:30 PM, the guy from the local cable company was waiting to get into the home. He quickly determined that the cable modem’s AC adapter was the culprit and got the blinky lights working with a fresh replacement. After a few fumbles in fixing things, he was on his way and we had at least a wired connection to the Internet. But how to share this with the other devices in our geeky family?
Enter HostAP, the wonderful package that turns a Linux box into a full-fledged access point. First I had to switch the drivers my laptop uses from the vendor-supplied (and closed-source) Broadcom 4315 (brcm43xx) to the Linux-supplied b43. Then I installed the iw package to determine whether this driver supported access point mode (it did). Then I installed hostapd, configuring it for 802.11 mode (g), channel (6), ssid, WEP key, and other minor settings.
Even so, I could not get my devices to connect. I also needed a dhcp server to dole out IP addresses and router information! To top it off, I needed to tell Linux to route my packets between devices, using the iptables commands.
With all of this in place, my laptop now serves as an access point and I learned a new geek skill in the process.