Struggling : Acer R3610 Nettop as Wifi AP for guests
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I'd like to use pfsense on a spare Acer R3610 to provide wifi access to friends and family who visit my house. I'd like to limit the speed and access to certain sites etc… Hence I thought pfsense would be a perfect fit...
I've got the latest version of pfsense installed and it appears to work fine with just the ethernet port acting as the WAN connection which connects into my standard ADSL router. I can access the web admin page easily enough from a client pc connected to my home LAN.
I then try and setup the wireless connection in the nettop as a second interface and this is where things start to go wrong.... My access to the web admin page stops working as soon as I turn on the wifi access point. When looking at the screen directly attached to the pfsense machine everything still seems to be working fine. If I reset back to factory settings then all works fine again.
My Windows 7 laptop does actually see the new wireless SSID but can't connect.
I obviously don't really know what I'm doing and was hoping to find something out there that might guide me through this particular setup. Has anyone seen something that might help me out?
Regards,
Tommy
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I then try and setup the wireless connection in the nettop as a second interface and this is where things start to go wrong…. My access to the web admin page stops working as soon as I turn on the wifi access point. When looking at the screen directly attached to the pfsense machine everything still seems to be working fine. If I reset back to factory settings then all works fine again.
How have you assigned the pfSense interfaces? I would be inclined to start with the WiFi as WAN and the wired as LAN, then access the pfSense GUI through the wired interface, configure the WiFi parameters through the web GUI, test WiFi and when it is working, interchange the interface assignments (WAN to wired, LAN to WiFi) and then reboot through the pfSense console.
What is the pfSense interface name of the WiFi interface (e.g. uath0, rum0 …)? You would be pretty lucky to have a supported WiFi interface that will also work as an access point built in.
My Windows 7 laptop does actually see the new wireless SSID but can't connect.
Does the laptop configure by DHCP? Do you have DHCP enabled in pfSense on the WiFi interface? How are you trying to "connect"? What are you trying to connect to? What is reported when you attempt to connect?
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Hi thanks for the reply…..
Not sure if the wifi card in the Acer R3610 will support being a wifi access point but it comes up as "ath0". I did notice that when pfsense boots up it does recognise the wireless card but I can't quite remember what it is and am not at home at the moment....
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Been searching the web and pretty sure the wifi card is a "Atheros 5xxx wireless card". How would I be able to find out if it does support being a wifi access point in pfsense?
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Mr. "search" is your friend ;)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AojFUXcbH0ROdHgwYkFHbkRUdV9hVWljVWl5SXkxbFE&hl=en_US#gid=0
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,38312.msg197739.html#msg197739
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Thanks for the links, google doc spreadsheet seems to indicate the Atheros cards can do pretty much everything? Will keep tinkering with this over the weekend and see what I can come up with…