I have been using an old laptop as an Access Point for our laptops to
connect to the internet through the main box -> modem connection.
The Lan (eth0) is bridged with a Netgear WG511U PCMCIA card (ath0) to
connect to the gatway computer.
It works fine, as an AP, but has one problem. The AP itself can not
connect to the internet through the gatway. The only way to update
the AP's software is to change /etc/network/interfaces from the
bridged setup to just a Lan setup, reboot, do the update/upgrade,
change the interfaces file back to the bridged mode and reboot again.
I have googled for an answer to this problem for the past 4 months,
without finding any answers. Either I didn't use the correct search
terms or no one else has had the same problem.
I would like to move the AP to an old 500Mhz headless box so that I
can setup the firewall and a mailserver, etc on it and free up the
laptop. I can't see how to do that with the above problem.
Here is the current bridged interfaces file. I would appreciate any
input on how I might go about fixing this.
------
/etc/init.d/interfaces
mapping hotplug
script grep
map eth0 ath0
# The primary network interface
#
#0000:05:00.0: 3Com PCI 3CCFE575CT Tornado CardBus at 0x4800.
#Vers LK1.1.19
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet manual
# Netgear WG511U PCMCIA Double 108 Mbps Card
## Bring up ath0 with the correct wifi settings
# "manual" causes it to bring up the interface without TCP/IP (which
auto ath0
iface ath0 inet manual
pre-up wlanconfig ath0 destroy
pre-up wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode ap
# remove the ath0 device when bringing the interface down
post-down ifconfig ath0 down
post-down wlanconfig ath0 destroy
post-down ifconfig eth0 down
post-down ifconfig br0 down
post-down brctl delbr br0
post-down ifconfig eth0 up
iwpriv ath0 bgscan 0
wireless-mode master
wireless-channel 6
wireless-essid Mtntop_AP
# The Debian Bridge method
auto br0
iface br0 inet static
address 192.168.1.8
network 192.168.1.0
netmask 255.255.255.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255
gateway 192.168.1.3
# bridge_ports all # this doesn't bring up ath0
bridge_ports ath0 eth0
route add default gateway 192.168.1.3
----------------
Thanks for 'any' suggestions!
Wayne