WiFi card is not used for blue0

Hardware
1

Hi,

I had a perfectly working IPFire-system where I installed everythign fro mscratch now to get rid of the “legacy”-warning, means I now installed the x64-package. The system is running, hostapd was installed and the backups for system and hostapd could be restored successfully.

But: WiFi is gone.

When I do a

/etc/init.d/hostapd start

I get an error message

Could not find interface with address blue0 for wireless access point

When I check in setup → Networking → Drivers and card assignments the wireless adapter is assigned to BLUE

iwconfig also tells me the hardware is there:

blue0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=20 dBm
Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off

In /etc/hostapd.conf a wrong driver was listed, I replaced it by ath9k (which is correct for the Qualcomm Atheros AR928X Wireless Network Adapter)

Neverhteless it isn ot working. So any idea what I could check?

Thanks!

2

Just try to disassociate the blue0 interface from the NIC in setup.
Then associate the NIC again.
Sometimes I had this behaviour with new hostapd versions, also. Don’t know what cause this.

3

OK, I tried associating BLUE via setup/drivers and card assignments to a different NIC and then back to the Wifi device. And I treid removing the assignment and then setting it back to the WiFi card.The only result in both cases: iwconfig now shows my WiFi device as dummy0:

dummy0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:off/any
Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=20 dBm
Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Power Management:off

red0 no wireless extensions.

green0 no wireless extensions.

lo no wireless extensions.

blue0 no wireless extensions.

In setup BLUE is correctly assigned but it is still dummy0 …

4

OK, I found it: it is an issue in /etc/init.d/hostapd script.

  1. the dummy0-issue was gone after a reboot.

  2. The problem with hostapd not starting was still there. I checked the script in /etc/init.d/hostapd and there is a bug:

First “blue0” is assigned to a variable INTERFACE (uppercase letters), later the variable “interface” (lowercase letters) is used. So this can’t work. The misleading error message about missing “blue0” came by a check which was done before starting hostapd but it did not make use of the variable but of some hardcoded text containing the information about blue0

5

That is not quite right!
I just changed /etc/init.d/hostapd to output “Starting hostapd… ${interface}” ( the variable set by find_interface() ). I get “Starting hostapd… blue0”, as expected.
Do you get error messages when running /etc/init.d/hostapd start or /etc/init.d/hostapd restart?

1 Like
6

Yes, the error-message is

which is the hard-coded text from the hostapd init script.

7

It isn’t hard-coded text, ‘blue0’ is the interface name.
But it wasn’t found in /sys/class/net ( as active/associated to my understanding of the bash script ).
So there should be some other errors from bringing up this interface.

8

OK and how can I find out what errors prevent it from coming up?

9

Update: ls -al /sys/class/net

lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 0 Jun 16 16:16 blue0 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:15.0/0000:05:00.0/net/blue0
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 0 Jun 16 16:16 eth0 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:04.0/0000:01:00.0/net/eth0
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 0 Jun 16 16:16 green0 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:06.0/0000:03:00.0/net/green0
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 0 Jun 16 16:16 lo -> ../../devices/virtual/net/lo
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 0 Jun 16 16:16 red0 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:05.0/0000:02:00.0/net/red0
10

You should get errors on reboot, for example,
The structure of /sys/class/net seems ok.
hostapd checks for the contents of /sys/class/net/blue0/address.
My installation shows the MAC of my wireless card.