Building a Wireless Access Point on Linux

By Peter Seebach
2005-04-12


Conclusions
This project is a lot easier than it probably sounded at first. The key here is building on other peoples' work. I'm building on Pebble. They're building on Debian. A lot of the hardest parts of this were already done. For instance, it could take a fair amount of testing and rebooting to figure out how to build a system to boot from a read-only filesystem. How many of us actually remember which files need to be modified during boot? For instance, /etc/network/ifstate is actually modified by the system. Log files are easy to remember, but other files can be harder to remember. Similarly, the installation process for getting minimal dependencies satisfied for an installation of Apache is handled automatically by the Debian package system.

Open source turned a project that once would have taken days or weeks into an idle afternoon's playing around. This makes hobbyist projects practical, but it also makes a good prototype; if you're planning to do an embedded system of some sort and want to make it an access point, this would be a good way to get some practice playing around with the software configuration long before your first hardware samples are ready.

Tutorial Pages:
» Custom Solution Offers Flexibility and Customizability -- and a Chance to Learn
» Why bother?
» Requirements
» Project Plan
» Conclusions
» Resources


First published by IBM DeveloperWorks

Related Tutorials: » Secrets of the Wireless Elite: Alexei Polyakov » Linux Wireless Networking » A New Strategy of Language Pack Management for Wireless Apps » Open Source Wireless Tools Emerge » Getting Practical About Wireless Security, Part 1: Building a Wireless Sniffer with Perl » Challenges and Opportunities in Mobile Games