Shawn Wood

And yet another follow up on to my noobie attempts at making this work. I discovered that Hostapd was just eating memory when the service was running. It would go about 24 hours before hosing the board. So I got a fresh install from Igors downloads (Debian Jessie Vanilla) - and this time I didn't apply any dist-upgrade, update or upgrade to it. The thing is now running perfectly. I'm getting solid, acceptable performance on the WIFI (it's not sizzling by any means, but given my slow ISP, it is as good as it needs to be). Been running several days and memory use has stabilized (with 800 megs free memory), no lock-ups yet. So - many thanks Igor for your most excellent images. I'm going to go back and re-image my other Banana Pi's to use these same versions!

@wildcat. Just wanted to update on this. Using the untouched image for Armbian Debian Jessie - Vanilla, on my Lamoba-R1 (with only an apt-get update and an apt-get dist-upgrad) - I was able to get solid, stable WIFI. I was originally testing it in an environment with 20 neighbors stepping on the channels, but when I took it to where it will be used - there is no interference. It was streaming 2 HD TV's and running speed tests at once, and delivering data as fast as my ISP allows - which is as good as I could hope for. So I've got to report that the build is working well. My glitch now is that the board appears to lock up at night. LED is on in the morning, ethernet lights are flickering, but no response from a ping or SSH. Not sure if one of the cron tasks is doing it, or what but will be experimenting with that.

Well, hell. I bought this device (pretty expensive compared to the banana pi) specifically to build a self-contained Wifi Router w/ embedded SoftEthernet to connect two separate networks together. I've spent so much time trying to just get the thing working to point that I can begin testing the SoftEthernet, hate to give up on it completely, and I hate to spend more money on more equipment. Let me ask you this. Do you think the slow download rate (13 mbps) that I was getting with the clean Armbian Jessie install was a problem w/ the Wifi, or possibly something else (since the upload rate was a sizzling 23 mbps)?

Rui wrote : Rui, Your write up is great, but I'm having some trouble (and forgive me, but I'm a newbie to all this). I got the latest Armbian Debian Jessie for the Lamobo R1 - and it worked first time, WIFI was stable as a rock, but my download rate was only 13mbs (upload was 23+). So I tried your steps - but am getting an error when I try to start hostapd service: Invalid Argument, and then a second error that there is no such file or directory. Running hostapd with -dd I get: drv->ifindex=5 Configure bridge br0 for EAPOL traffic. ioctrl [sIOCSIWMODE]: Invalid Argument Could not set interface to mode (3) Could not set interface to master mode! rtl871xdrv driver initialization failed. I don't have a var/run/hostapd (as referenced in the hostapd.conf file). I'm guessing that's for a command line interface, so I commented this line out of the hostapd.conf file. One other thing. I've repeated this more than once, and now see that I get an error when making dkms. Did I miss a step somewhere? Thanks for any help or advice you can give me. Shawn.