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I've been trying to setup the Pi as a WiFi AP, so that I can use it in Hotels to allow multiple devices to use the same WiFi connection. On the net there are multiple tutorials on how to do this. Such as: Pi 3 as a Wi-Fi Repeater

All works well up to the points where you should edit sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces. On my system this file is basically empty and has no references to either wlan0 or lan0. What I have in my "interfaces" file is:

interfaces(5) file used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8)

Please note that this file is written to be used with dhcpcd

For static IP, consult /etc/dhcpcd.conf and 'man dhcpcd.conf'

Include files from /etc/network/interfaces.d:

source-directory /etc/network/interfaces.d

Not sure where I'm going wrong and I've read through a lot of the tutorials. Could it be that the newest Kernel Version (4.9) has changes compared to the earlier version with regards to the networking?

Milliways
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Chris
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2 Answers2

7

There is NOTHING WRONG. See How do I set up networking/WiFi/Static IP for an explanation of the network settings in Stretch.

The interfaces file is largely empty because it is not necessary - I used to run a late Wheezy (using dhcpcd without one). It was only used because dhcpcd was incompletely setup, prior to Stretch.

The problem is no one has updated the tutorials.

I have not recently used the Pi in such a manner, and I am not sure the tutorials you are following are the best practice, but you should be able to adapt them - either that or go back to an old Raspbian.

See Wireless Access Point for a Foundation tutorial.

NOTE this is also not up to date, and will need to be adapted.

You will need to consider the following issues:-

  1. Predictable Network Interface Names
  2. Disable dhcpcd, either entirely or for the interfaces which do not need it.
Milliways
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3

If you want to put back the /etc/network/interfaces style network configuration, you need to uninstall the packages raspberrypi-net-mods and dhcpcd5.

I did so because I wanted to set up a token for building the local part of the IPv6 addresses (see https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/335633/253665) but found no way how to do this with dhcpcd.

Update

A simpler solution is to disable the dhcpcd.service:

systemctl mask dhcpcd.service
Adrian W
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