Creating a Wireless Router / Access Point with #raspberrypi and #raspbian #linux

What about creating my own low powered development network infrastructure at home? Sounds like a good idea, right? You can hack the router settings, creating vlans, control your network traffic, ...

Other reason is to create an abstraction layer between your ISP router and your physical network that can be moved when you move to your shinny new flat!

Let's get to business then. The router hardware is composed by a raspberry PI model A and a USB WiFi (802.11b/g/n) Module with Antenna for Raspberry. The raspberry was configured to boot from a 4gb USB pen drive with a swap partition and the /tmp size was increased (instructions).

My router is using 10.0.0.0/24 network and my internal network 10.10.0.0/24.

First of all, install the software:

sudo apt-get install hostapd bind9 isc-dhcp-server ntpdate

This will install AP, DNS, DHCP and NTP support.

Now you need to configure the following files (click on each title to see the configuration!):

interfaces

Configure the network interfaces.

iptables

Configure the firewall, NAT, and forwarding rules.

dhcp

The dhcp server configuration allows the dynamic dns update, meaning that the hostname of the dhcp client is added to the dns.

You can also configure DHCP to only listen to the wireless device.

> sudo vim /etc/default/isc-dhcp-server
INTERFACES="wlan0"

To enable logging, you also need to:

> sudo vim /etc/rsyslog.conf

# add the line

local7.* /var/log/dhcpd.log

dns

Be sure you also run:

# Enable dynamic dns

> sudo chown bind /etc/bind/

hostapd

Enables the wireless access point.

Sync Boot

Lastly, you need to disable the services from boot. This is because the raspberry don't have a battery and then it doesn't save the system date which causes DNS and DHCP to fail.

We need to sync the initialisation of the raspberry to first get the date from NTP servers and then initialise the router services.

sudo update-rc.d hostapd remove
sudo update-rc.d bind remove
sudo update-rc.d isc-dhcp-server remove
sudo update-rc.d ntp remove

Now, we create the boot script to initialise all:

• https://gist.github.com/aetheon/8489749#file-init-router-sh
• https://gist.github.com/aetheon/8489749#file-init-d-init-router

sudo update-rc.d init-router defaults
sudo update-rc.d init-router enable

Conclusion

I'm very happy with the raspberry performance. I did not notice any significant decrease on network speed. My next step is to configure vlan support and dynamic dns support to be able to access when I'm away from home.

Also, I'll fiddle a little around the iptables rules to have full network control.

If you have any problems or suggestions regarding this post, you can always contact me.

CodeProject

Visit www.divhide.com for more information, contacts and news about Web Development.

See other blog posts at blog.divhide.com.

Divhide's purpose is to follow the HTML5 movement and contribute with applications which prove the quality of technology.

Feel free to contact divhide.