Cubietruck - Kernel 3.4.108 - Jessie 8.1 - hostapd not working

[chessplayer]

Hi,

 

I successfully installed owncloud on the Cubietruck. Because of owncloud, I decided to give jessie a try, since there are more packages I need already included. Got all that working.

 

Now, I wanted to make the Cubietruck into a wireless AP following the instructions in the FAQ on Igor's blog. However, i am getting nowhere.

 

After boot, hostapd seems to be running:

ps -elf | grep hostapd
1 S root       677     1  0  80   0 -  1040 poll_s 18:25 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/hostapd -B -P /run/hostapd.pid /etc/hostapd.conf

However, the SSID is not picked up by any client, so it seems as if it is not braodcast. However, it is not hidden either, since I cannot add the network. When I try to restart the service, I get no output from it (where ist should give some the way I understand the init script). The service is stopped afterwards, but it is not running anymore. I can do:

service hostapd status
â— hostapd.service - LSB: Advanced IEEE 802.11 management daemon
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/hostapd)
   Active: active (exited) since Wed 2015-08-05 18:54:43 CEST; 10min ago
  Process: 1114 ExecStop=/etc/init.d/hostapd stop (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 1117 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/hostapd start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Aug 05 18:54:43 cubietruck hostapd[1117]: Starting advanced IEEE 802.11 management: hostapd.
Aug 05 18:54:43 cubietruck systemd[1]: Started LSB: Advanced IEEE 802.11 management daemon.
Aug 05 19:03:10 cubietruck systemd[1]: Started LSB: Advanced IEEE 802.11 management daemon.

Ergo: it stays exited (whereas, when I stop the service and then start it again, it says "running" istead of exited). So, I try the following by hand:

hostapd /etc/hostapd.conf
Configuration file: /etc/hostapd.conf
nl80211: Could not re-add multicast membership for vendor events: -2 (No such file or directory)
Using interface wlan0 with hwaddr <somaddress> and ssid "myssid"
wlan0: interface state UNINITIALIZED->ENABLED
wlan0: AP-ENABLED 

^Cwlan0: interface state ENABLED->DISABLED

wlan0: AP-DISABLED 

nl80211: deinit ifname=wlan0 disabled_11b_rates=0

So, it is doing something (until I kill it using <CTRL>+<C>), but what?. The SSID still isn't available, though. 

 

Also, according to this, the kernel module must be in op_mode 2:

modprobe bcmdhd op_mode=2

This does not change anything, however. Finally, here is my hostapd.conf:

ssid=myssid
interface=wlan0
hw_mode=g
channel=8 
driver=nl80211
bridge=br0
logger_syslog=0
logger_syslog_level=0
wmm_enabled=1
ieee80211n=1
wpa=2
preamble=1
wpa_passphrase=mypassphrase
wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
wpa_pairwise=TKIP
rsn_pairwise=CCMP
auth_algs=1
macaddr_acl=0
noscan=1
## SSID verheimlichen
# 0 = sichtbar
# 1 = Sende leere SSID und ignoriere Anfragen die die SSID nicht enthalten
# 2 = Sende leere SSID, aber setze die Länge nicht auf 0, sondern genau auf die 
# Länge der SSID (einige Clients brauchen das.)
ignore_broadcast_ssid=0
#ht_capab=[HT40-][SHORT-GI-40][SHORT-GI-40][DSSS_CCK-40]
#country_code=SI
#ieee80211d=1

Any ideas?

 

Cheers,

 

chessplayer

[chessplayer]

Hi again,

 

to answer my own question:

 

a) It is more or less a duplicate of this one (sorry about that).

 

I do not know what excatly I was doing wrong before, but I must have gotten the combination of setting the op_mode for the module bcmdhd and running hostapd with that wrong somehow. Anyway, as Igor pointed out in the thread mentioned in a), we must load the module with the option a mentioned above. This must be done using an appropriate options file, e.g. doing

echo "options bcmdhd op_mode=2" | tee /etc/modprobe.d/bcmdhd.conf 

Doing that, everything is fine (even with the SSID hidden).

 

P.S.: I would like to mark this as "solved", but it seems I cannot change the title ...

 

Cheers,

 

chessplayer

 

P.P.S.: Obviously, someone managed to change the title ...