Saw this, "When the hotspot is not available or it is incorrectly defined in the wireless configuration file, OpenWrt will disable the AP." In the AP Hotspot guide.
I don't get why it works this way by default and you have to do a script work around. Please enlighten me.
It seems a very common use case would be that you have a device that you access for admin over the AP. And whether or not the Hotspot is active doesn't change the need to admin it. I'm flumoxed.
The STA- (client-) interface is the dominant one in this combination, the AP interface you spawn yourself needs to follow the STA interface (as the remote AP you're connecting to decides over the used channels, etc.). If there is no STA interface, the AP interface can't be enabled, as the STA one might still come up later.
Thanks. Sounds like basically you don't want to have AP active as STA may want to use same channel(s).
Is your answer still true in a 2 radio scenario. Like you use radio0 for STA and radio1 for AP?
It's not so much 'don't wan't', but 'can't' (without further orchestration from userspace).
This is per-radio, with multiple radios and a dedicated one for the client link, this problem gores away.
Quite the opposite: you can't have AP active as it must use the same channel as STA, and it is unknown.
Technically speaking if the channel is manually set and it's not a DFS channel the AP should start, but it doesn't happen.
If you assume the user has configured wrong the channel that is used for both STA and AP then sorry to say but in this case you have to assume that everything the user has configured is wrong and in such case I can't see how OpenWRT can be used.
This might be acceptable if the channel is set to auto.
I know for sure that in the case of some older OpenWRT versions this STA + AP situation makes OpenWRT ignore the manually set channel something that I don't find it as normal.
Example: OpenWRT (single wifi used for both STA and AP) wifi channel manually set to 6, sta supposed to connect to SSID "1234", AP for SSID "1234" running on channel 1, sta will connect to SSID "1234" and the OpenWRT AP will run on channel 1 totally ignoring the channel 6 settings. For me expected behaviour is STA doesn't connect to SSID "1234" and OpenWRT AP runs on channel 6.
Without a setting like "Allow STA to override the manually set channel" checked STA should follow the manually set channel even if it makes it impossible to connect to the AP ("1234" in my example).
The moment when STA ignores the manually set channel is the moment when STA is above the settings the user made something that is totaly wrong from my point of view.
This new setting "Allow STA to override the manually set channel" should have no impact if that wifi interface is only STA (I see a reason for it to work in STA only case also (2 APs, same SSID, same password, same mac, not same channel)), but it should have an impact if that wifi interface is STA+AP.
Thanks all. I grasp the underlying technical issues now.
From admin perspective, I just want to be able to connect to AP whether the STA link is up or not. So, I can use the workaround script or TravelMate.
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