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WLAN-ACCESS-POINT.md

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Access Jukebox without Router

It is possible to connect to the jukebox directly, without having your laptop and the jukebox connect to the same WiFi network. Configuring the Raspberry Pi to be a WiFi access point.

I tested this only with the Raspberry Pi 3, which has a WiFi card onboard. If you successfully did the same with another Raspberry Pi version, please share your knowledge, I will weave it into the documenation. The reason I say this is because creating a WiFi access point requires a WiFi card that supports this mode. RPi3 does.

Install two packages we need later. Later meaning: when we might not have Internet anymore. Because the wlan0 interface will be set to a static IP to create the access point.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install dnsmasq hostapd

Configure the network

Using jessie, dhcpd is activated by default. This dhcp daemon is assigning IP addresses to devices which want to connect to the jukebox.

Set the IP address for the wlan card by opening:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

Replace the existing content with the following lines:

# Localhost
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# Ethernet
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet manual

# WLAN-Interface
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static
address 192.168.1.1
netmask 255.255.255.0

Now, the wlan is set to the IP address 192.168.1.1.

We add one line to the dhcpd config file:

sudo nano /etc/dhcpcd.conf

Append the line:

denyinterfaces wlan0

Now we reboot and afterwards you should be connected to your RPi directly, not via ssh. Because if your RPi relied on a WiFi connection to the Internet, this will be cut off. Remember: we need the wlan0 interface to hook up other devices to a WiFi network the RPi is creating.

Let's check if all interfaces are up and running. We only really need the wlan0 but if eth0 is also up and is connected to the Internet, your jukebox will be online and all devices connected to it. Type in the command line:

ip a

This should list both interfaces (eth0 and wlan0). If it does, you can connect the RPi to the Internet via an ethernet cable. But you still won't be able to connect to the RPi via ssh quite yet. So make sure you have the RPi hooked up to a keyboard and a monitor.

Reboot.

sudo reboot

dhcp server configuration

sudo nano /etc/dnsmasq.conf

The following lines are the minimal configuration required.

# interface which is active
interface=wlan0

# interface to ignore
no-dhcp-interface=eth0

# IPv4 addresses and lease time
dhcp-range=192.168.1.100,192.168.1.200,24h

# DNS
dhcp-option=option:dns-server,192.168.1.1

Check the configuration before you start the dhcp server and cache.

dnsmasq --test -C /etc/dnsmasq.conf

This should return 'OK'. Now start dnsmasq:

sudo systemctl restart dnsmasq

Check if it is up and running:

sudo systemctl status dnsmasq

Now install dnsmasq to start after boot:

sudo systemctl enable dnsmasq

configure hostapd

To assign ssid and password, we need to configure hostapd.

sudo nano /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf

Replace the content of this file (if it already exists) with the following content.

# interface and driver
interface=wlan0
#driver=nl80211

# WLAN-config
ssid=jukebox
channel=1
hw_mode=g
ieee80211n=1
ieee80211d=1
country_code=DE
wmm_enabled=1

# WLAN-encryption
auth_algs=1
wpa=2
wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
rsn_pairwise=CCMP
wpa_passphrase=Pl4yM3N0w

The network will be listed as jukebox and the password to connect to the network is Pl4yM3N0w (as in 'play me now' with a number four and a number three and a zero). If you want a different ssid and/or password, edit the lines above.

This file contains a password in raw text, so make sure only root can read it.

sudo chmod 600 /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf

Check if this setup is correct. Open the wlan host in debug mode and read through the results.

sudo hostapd -dd /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf

Scroll up to see if you can find these two lines anywhere:

wlan0: interface state COUNTRY_UPDATE->ENABLED
wlan0: AP-ENABLED

If yes, you can also try to hook up a device with the network already. See if you can find jukebox as a WiFi network.

If that works, all is well. Stop the hostapd daemon with Ctrl&C.

Before we can start hostapd on boot, we have to add a few lines in the config file to specify the location of the config file.

sudo nano /etc/default/hostapd

Add these lines:

RUN_DAEMON=yes
DAEMON_CONF="/etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf"

And start hostapd with the following commands:

sudo systemctl start hostapd
sudo systemctl enable hostapd

Check if the daemon is up and running:

sudo systemctl status hostapd

This concludes what we need to connect to the jukebox directly via WiFi.

If you plan to connect the eth0 via a cable with the Internet, you need to learn about firewall configurations. Google how to do this (I hope to replace this last paragraph with a nicer explanation and a link later, when I find the time. Apologies.)