wifi ap over usb

Hi all,

Does anyone know about a USB wifi device that can act as an access
point without using ndiswrapper? (that's for an arm platform).

Thanks for your reply,
-AJ

Antoine Junod wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Does anyone know about a USB wifi device that can act as an access
> point without using ndiswrapper? (that's for an arm platform).
>
> Thanks for your reply,

Zydas ZD1201 and ZD1211, but it's not incredible stable.

--
Lasse Jensen [fafler at g mail dot com]
Linux, the choice of a GNU generation.

Lasse Jensen <(E-Mail Removed)> writes:

> Antoine Junod wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Does anyone know about a USB wifi device that can act as an access
>> point without using ndiswrapper? (that's for an arm platform).
>>
>> Thanks for your reply,
>
> Zydas ZD1201 and ZD1211, but it's not incredible stable.

I've juste tried to make it work for two weeks now, without great
success. The only available driver providing the AP facility is the
old one provided by Zydas that's not supported nor developped
anymore. And it is able to work as an AP only if the client is
retrying tons of times (the driver seems to not send any beacon
frames). And frankly, code is not clean enough to accept any
modifications. The driver included in the kernel, zd1211rw, does not
handle the AP mode, its git tree has not been modified for several
months and it seems there is no roadmap and no work that goes into an
AP feature direction.

The dream would be to find a Prism based USB wifi device that's
supportred by hostapd. But I'm not able to find any documentation /
page about such a device.

A+
-AJ

Antoine Junod wrote:

> Lasse Jensen <(E-Mail Removed)> writes:
>
>> Antoine Junod wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> Does anyone know about a USB wifi device that can act as an access
>>> point without using ndiswrapper? (that's for an arm platform).
>>>
>>> Thanks for your reply,
>>
>> Zydas ZD1201 and ZD1211, but it's not incredible stable.
>
> I've juste tried to make it work for two weeks now, without great
> success. The only available driver providing the AP facility is the
> old one provided by Zydas that's not supported nor developped
> anymore. And it is able to work as an AP only if the client is
> retrying tons of times (the driver seems to not send any beacon
> frames). And frankly, code is not clean enough to accept any
> modifications. The driver included in the kernel, zd1211rw, does not
> handle the AP mode, its git tree has not been modified for several
> months and it seems there is no roadmap and no work that goes into an
> AP feature direction.

I know. And when it finally did work, it crashed my entire system a couple
of times every week. Had to sacrifice my SCSI card for a Atheros based PCI
card instead of my ZD1211 USB device.

> The dream would be to find a Prism based USB wifi device that's
> supportred by hostapd. But I'm not able to find any documentation /
> page about such a device.

I don't think such a thing exist. Except maybe with one of the rare USB to
PCMCIA bridges, but i have no idea if they are supported under Linux. The
ZD1201 might be a little better. Had one once, but accidently fried it
after i tried to replace the antenna. Anyway, although it was b only and
was just about fast enough to stream DivX if mplayer had a really big
buffer and all my bluetooth devices was turned off, it was a lot more
stable than the ZD1211.

--
Lasse Jensen [fafler at g mail dot com]
Linux, the choice of a GNU generation.

> Does anyone know about a USB wifi device that can act as an access
> point without using ndiswrapper? (that's for an arm platform).

It seems that the rt73usb driver (included in 2.6.24) can do that.
Many (not anywhere near "most, sadly) USB cards use the rt73 chipset.
My Belkin F5D7050 does, for example, tho I haven't actually tried to use
it in master mode.

You may want to ask on the hostapd mailing-list, where I expect you'll
find the highest concentration of people who know about running access
points under GNU/Linux (especially if you want to create a WPA network).


Stefan


PS: AFAIK ndiswrapper can't be used to make access points anyway.