I have an OpenWRT AP in my living room with the upling, consoles and WDTVLive connected. In my work room I have two laptops, a desktop, a server and an NAS ... that might all want to get some internet. Its not a problem with the laptops but I only have one wifi dongle (Zydas G220, zd1211rw driver with fully supported master mode using nl80211 in hostapd).

So I thought it can't be that hard to connect the wifi stick to my server and share the WIFI from the OpwnWrt to the LAN in the working room. Masquerading is not an option, as I might stream a video or mp3s from my NAS to the WDTVLive with DLNA.

The OpenWRT side was easy enough with nice images on http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/clientmode and documentation for nl80211 based WDS on http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/recipes/atheroswds.

A default linux system running hostapd seems to be a different story. I dug through the ubuntu documentation and found out that sharing WIFI on a LAN has been disabled in the Kernel if the WIFI card is not in master mode. The only hints on http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Docum … lient_mode are

iw phy phy0 interface add moni0 type managed 4addr on

and for hostapd

wds_sta=1

I sucessfully can connect my USB stick to my default ssid. Even after creating the WDS AP on the OpenWRT router my other devices can still access the internet, so I did not break anything. But how do I configure the funny mix of wpa_supplicant, hostapd, bridging and general network settings on ubuntu so that I can share the WIFI connection to my other boxes in the same room?

I need help! Seriously, in more than one way wink Time to go to sleep, the sun is rising ...