How to disable AP?

Francesco Pessolano

This is extremely disappointing. Basically it makes the device 5000000% unsecure.

Stefano P.

You can't just disable the AP and keep wifi client. You will have to disable wifi all together or make AP SSID hidden

Thank you for the reply. How to hide AP SSID?

Luciano S.

@Stefano-P. , check out the uci tool (don't just edit config files ... the source of mistakes is to big, with uci you will be on the saver side):

https://lede-project.org/docs/user-guide/introduction_to_lede_configuration
https://lede-project.org/docs/user-guide/wifi_configuration

hidden | boolean | no | 0 | Turns off SSID broadcasting if set to 1

Tanti saluti Luciano S.

Stefano P.

@Luciano-S. Ti ringrazio!

Francesco Pessolano

@Luciano-S. said in How to disable AP?:

@Stefano-P. , check out the uci tool (don't just edit config files ... the source of mistakes is to big, with uci you will be on the saver side):

https://lede-project.org/docs/user-guide/introduction_to_lede_configuration
https://lede-project.org/docs/user-guide/wifi_configuration

hidden | boolean | no | 0 | Turns off SSID broadcasting if set to 1

Tanti saluti Luciano S.

For me the hidden flag did not work. Luciano, did it work for you

Grazie

Luciano S.

@Francesco-Pessolano , yes:

uci show
uci set wireless.default_radio0.hidden='1'
uci commit
uci reload_config
reboot
...
result:
wireless.default_radio0=wifi-iface
wireless.default_radio0.device='radio0'
wireless.default_radio0.network='lan'
wireless.default_radio0.mode='ap'
wireless.default_radio0.ssid='Omega-####'
wireless.default_radio0.encryption='psk2'
wireless.default_radio0.key='thisismysecret'
wireless.default_radio0.hidden='1'

But i'm testing a LEDE image.

Stefano P.

@Luciano-S @Francesco-Pessolano It worked for me. (Reboot needed)

Francesco Pessolano

you mean you can reboot this thing? reboot for me does not work
anyhow I tried to set

wireless.@wifi-iface[0].hidden='true'

but it did nothing, There is no default radio on the standard os

Stefano P.

@Francesco-Pessolano this is what I did:

uci set wireless.@wifi-iface[0].hidden='1'
uci commit
reload_config
reboot
Since 'hidden' value is set to 1, when my Omega boot up the AP ssid is hidden as expected.

Francesco Pessolano

I will try even if everytime i do reload_config it stalls everything and i need to turn off and on

Overall, i am happy with this chip ... i only wish there was more support especially on the source codes

Paul Miller

@Zheng-Han hiding the AP doesn't really do anything. You can still see the signal and the wifi mac and proceed with attacks as usuall, but more concerning, it's using up that valuable wifi spectrum for no reason.
I can see all my neighbor's hidden ssids, wmacs and all with an app on my phone. Mine's a $2 app called WiFi Analyzer --- but there's free ones.

Whatever.

Requires further testing, but I seemed to have killed the AP with:

iwpriv ra0 set Channel=0 # dead now

I wonder if it's a hidden driver setting or a bug or something; but it seems to have worked.

note that uci set wireless.ra0.channel=0 does NOT work. You have to iwpriv or the channel seems to be hardcoded at 11...

Francesco Pessolano

I definitively agree, i truly hate to have the on and have a bck door not protected from my router

Paul Miller

After further testing, it appears still to be working... so I went source diving and found mainly the problem is in the /lib/wifi/ralink.sh -- it seems intentionally or by bug to lookup the apcli0 channel and overwrite whatever you put in wireless.ra0.channel -- or possibly looks up the channel of the AP the client connects to and overwrites the AP channel with that (for whatever reason).

But the client works fine on channel 0 iff you set only the ra0 channel to 0.

So I made a new setting and kludged it in rudely just above the part where it sets the channel for the ra0 dev with iwpriv.

Note that applying this patch, while allowing uci set wireless.ra0.ra0_only_channel 0, will also prevent opkg from being able to update the ralink-wifi-mt76x8 package; possibly leaving you with no ralink drivers installed. Be sure to copy the ipk to /root/ if you plan to use this patch so you can rescue the system over serial... or just factory reset or whatever, that seems pretty painless.

--- ralink.sh-orig  2017-02-14 17:43:04.885469047 -0500
+++ ralink.sh-mine  2017-02-14 17:50:07.826365772 -0500
@@ -598,8 +598,15 @@
             
                set_wifi_up "$vif" "$ifname"
        done
-   
-   [ "$channel" != "auto" ] && iwpriv $device set Channel=$channel
+
+   # I made a slightly difference settings space so I could have a
+   # different channel for each device.
+   # 
+   # use uci set wireless.ra0.ra0_only_channel 0 to disable AP
+
+   config_get ${device}_only_channel $device mah_only_channel $channel
+
+   [ "$channel" != "auto" ] && iwpriv $device set Channel=$mah_only_channel
        iwpriv $device set MaxStaNum=$maxassoc
 }

Himura Kazuto

@Paul-Miller I tried your way but without luck. ApCliEnable automatically fails to '0' for some reason and I can't keep my STA link...

I set the ssid and password to random strings of maximum length and hided the network, seems like this works

Paul Miller

@Himura-Kazuto agreed. I'm sure this worked at one point … a while later, I discovered it nolonger worked, or I imagined it or something. Maybe I was on a different firmware version (and have no idea which)? Who knows.

I shelved the omega2. It's a pile. It's neat as a novelty, but overall it's a pile. I'm using other devices instead.

mac lad

So is it confirmed that the WiFi access point on the Omega2 cannot be disabled? If that's the case, this is a dealbreaker.

Paul: Which device did you end up using?

luz

With the proprietary driver the Omega2 ships with - sadly, yes, the AP is always on.

But with the open source mt76 driver, disabling the AP is no problem.

And note that mt76 has matured a lot since this thread started a year ago! As a true open source project, there are people working steadily to improve it. There are updates every few weeks to make it better. For my needs, mt76 has become stable enough already many months ago. And it is a much cleaner setup, using standard cfg80211. I like it way better than these sad proprietary chunks of code tied to a specific kernel version and thus blocking all other progress!

Lazar Demin

Just wanted to jump in and comment about this topic with regard to the WiFi Warp Core driver (b175 and up):
It is currently not possible to disable the AP and keep the WiFi client.
However, it is possible to configure the AP to be hidden (not broadcasting the SSID):

uci set wireless.ap.hidden=1
uci commit wireless
wifi

Alexander Levakov

@Stefano-P. said in How to disable AP?:

Hi guys, I wanna know if it is possible to disable AP through command line.

Install Firmware 183.
Edit file /etc/config/wireless download example
Edit file /etc/config/network download example
A few seconds after the booting execute
ifconfig ra0 down

The AP is turned off. Internet continues to work.

Alexander Levakov

I've added ethernet to wifi-client bridge.
Throughput is about 50 MBit

To start/stop wifi-ap execute
ifconfig ra0 up
ifconfig ra0 down

Download config files