billauer
commented
10 years ago Sorry, it was my mistake. I assigned the access point with an IP address that belonged to another NIC's subnet, so this was really a routing issue on the access point.
I didn't see this problem immediately, because the ARP requests were ignored, which mislead me to think that this was a deeper issue. It turns out that ARP requests are ignored when the NIC doesn't think it can be useful with the IP it has.
I've updated to blog post mentioned above to reflect this insight.
Now all works fine. Eli
Hello,
I've compiled the current revision of the rtl8188eu.git driver against a 3.12.20 kernel (with no errors or warnings) and also cleanly compiled the current hostapd from Realtek. All in all, I managed to set up a WPA connection where the RTL8188EU device functioned as AP at the Ethernet level: With a sniffer, I verified that Ethernet packets go across, and the client was properly assigned an IP address with DHCP.
The problem is that the AP doesn't respond to ARP requests, even though the requested IP address is the one assigned to wlan0 with ifconfig. Neither does it respond to pings (as for how the client knew the AP's MAC address -- I used gratuitous ARP from the AP). The AP had no problem sending ARP requests, of course.
So the Wifi dongle (or its driver) behaves as if it was somehow detached from the IP protocol layer, or didn't know its IP address. I don't know what exactly.
The same problem was repeated exactly, with an RTL8192CU device, with the rtl8192cu-fixes.git repository, which is Realtek's driver + fixed to work with a recent kernel.
For more details, please look at my blog post on this: http://billauer.co.il/blog/2014/06/linux-realtek-hostapd/
Any insights?
Thanks, Eli