Goal

Make a transparent wireless bridge to connect to wired networks without any extra software daemons or vpn tunneling. This assigns static IP's to the STA and AP, no dhcpd used in this example.

Network Diagram

office hub <-- enet --> AP <-- wireless --> Station <-- enet --> laptop

Short Answer

  • Set up a simple station and access point configuration as described on this wiki
  • Issue "iwpriv ath0 wds 1" on both station and ap

Hardware Used

This was proven to work for WRAP .2E with wireless cards containing atheros 5213 chipsets.

Explicit Steps

Setting up AP

Wireless Setup 

wlanconfig ath0 destroy
wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode ap
iwconfig ath0 essid test
# wds 1 enables 4 address frames necessary for bridging to eth0
iwpriv ath0 wds 1

Bridge Setup 

ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 up
ifconfig ath0 0.0.0.0 up

brctl addbr br0
brctl addif br0 eth0
brctl addif br0 ath0

ifconfig br0 192.168.0.101 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

Verify you can ping the AP's ip and something else on its wired network.

Setting up STA

Wireless Setup 

wlanconfig ath0 destroy
wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode sta
iwconfig ath0 essid test
# wds 1 enables 4 address frames necessary for bridging to eth0
iwpriv ath0 wds 1

Bridge Setup 

ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 up
ifconfig ath0 0.0.0.0 up

brctl addbr br0
brctl addif br0 eth0
brctl addif br0 ath0

ifconfig br0 192.168.0.102 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

Verify you can ping the STA's ip and something else on its wired network.

Finally try pinging the AP from the STA and the other way around.

Notes

I'm seeing high amount of OFDM errors on AP through athstats but I don't know if that's expected or not. Also the AP is panicking on occaision, this configuration has only had a day or so of testing.

On an AMD Geode(tm) 1.3GHz system with Fedora Core 6 (kernel 2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 SMP) and madwifi-0.9.3.1, the system appears to lock up on a regular basis. Still looking at the problem. EDIT: Upgraded to 2.6.21.5-SMP kernel using busybox and some Slackware packages on a PXE-boot image. So far, It does not lockup when used as master (ap) mode.