I'm having some problems with hostapd and bridging a wireless to a wired network that are driving me insane! I'm running Debian Sarge with a 2.6.8-2 kernel and an Atheros chipset on the wireless card.
I'm able to bring up the access point with
#iwconfig ath0 essid cabe and connect to it, but I cannot ping another computer on the wired network. It's as if the bridge is not working. However, by some miracle I DID have hostapd working at one point, and at the time I could ping a wired machine from the wireless and vice versa. I have no idea why hostapd broke but now every time I try to run
#/etc/init.d/hostapd start I get
Starting advanced IEEE 802.11 management: hostapd...failed. I've looked in both the /tmp/hostapd.dump and /var/log/daemon.log files but there is nothing, even when debug=4 in hostapd.conf. I have started with a completely default hostapd.conf, only changing the ssid, driver, and adding in the bridge var (this was not in the original hostapd.conf, but somewhere in my many painful hours of reading about this topic it was suggested that this var is required so hostapd will know it's part of a bridge).
I am at my wits end with this and am about to kill someone, so please help reduce the homicide rate and overpopulation of the jail system by helping me figure this out!
Here are the relevant files:
/etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf (with all commented lines removed)
Code:
bridge=br0
interface=ath0
driver=madwifi
logger_syslog=-1
logger_syslog_level=2
logger_stdout=-1
logger_stdout_level=2
debug=0
dump_file=/tmp/hostapd.dump
ssid=cabe
macaddr_acl=0
auth_algs=0
eap_authenticator=0
eapol_key_index_workaround=0
/etc/network/interfaces
Code:
auto lo eth1 ath0 br0
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth1 inet dhcp
iface ath0 inet manual
pre-up wlanconfig ath0 destroy
pre-up wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode ap
iface br0 inet static
bridge_ports eth0 ath0
address 192.168.0.2
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.0.0
broadcast 192.168.0.255
help: using a linux laptop as an access point 
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