Luci AP Controller

Community Builds, Projects & Packages
1

Just found a few days ago this project: https://github.com/obsy/apcontroller

I found it very useful because on my router I can have all the information of my wireless clients that are connected to all of my APs (SSID they are connected, IP, MAC, signal strength, etc.). I was running a bash script and sending the data to Zabbix in order to have this information concentrated in one place; it is very important for me to troubleshoot issues with my IoT devices (100+ devices at home). It also allows mass configuration of wireless networks on all APs.

Few screenshots I took:

image
image1255Ă—608 42.6 KB

image
image1218Ă—739 36.9 KB

I am not involved with this project in any way.

EDIT: It would be nice to have it integrated on the official OpenWRT packages, for a more convinient installation.

Credits to @obsy and @8Mi_Yile

8 Likes
2

This looks cool. Thanks for posting.

3

Thanks for the tip!
This extension is super cool.
In my opinion, that’s exactly what OpenWrt has been missing.

Now all we need is a small standalone version of it—for the Raspberry Pi or something similar—so we can have long-term logging with even cooler dashboards.
A central controller like those from Ubiquity or TP-Link (Omada) for OpenWrt would be my ideal solution.

4

Thanks for sharing.

How does it handle channel allocation per access point? Right now, I am manually managing 4 access points at home (all wired and running OpenWrt), and I manually assign Wi-Fi channels to reduce overlap.

Ideally, it would be nice if it could read the current configuration from each access point and allow setting common options for all of them (such as SSIDs and passwords), while still allowing custom configuration per access point (for example, channel selection).

5

Like I mentioned only using it to see all WIFI clients. I have 6 APs all with static channels to avoid overlap, since they are fixed into the wall it’s a one time job configuring the channels so no big deal for me. Also already have all of my 4 SSID configured pervisously (with VLAN’s) on the router and all 6 APs.

1 Like
6

For that I belive OpenWISP or OpenSOHO is what you are looking for.

7

The controller idea is excellent. I just have a couple of security-related comments for true paranoids.

Use SSH Key only changes the authentication method, but it does not protect against AP/server impersonation if StrictHostKeyChecking=no is still used.

I think the safer default should be:

-o StrictHostKeyChecking=yes
-o UserKnownHostsFile=/root/.ssh/known_hosts

at least in these scripts:

/usr/bin/apcontroller
/usr/bin/apcontroller-sendconfig

Currently, if an attacker gets access to the AP management network, they could impersonate an AP IP. With StrictHostKeyChecking=no, the controller may accept the fake SSH server and continue with scp/ssh.

Using password authentication makes this worse: the controller may send the AP password to the fake SSH server. So in my opinion, password-based authentication is a bad idea for this kind of tool. Key-based authentication is much better, but it should still be combined with proper SSH host key checking.

8

Did the changes on SCP commands on both scripts to run with the mentioned options and works perfectly without any issue.

1 Like