Recommendation About An Usb Wireless Adapter To Use It As HostAP

Home » CentOS » Recommendation About An Usb Wireless Adapter To Use It As HostAP
CentOS 4 Comments

Hi all,

I would like to install/test CentOS 7.X as a hostap for my home. I am thinking to use an Alfa (http://www.alfa.com.tw) usb wireless adapter or TP-Link. BUt there is not much information in Alfa’s or TP-Link’s web sites about which of them can run as a HostAP. If I can find any adapter that supports ac with a throughput of 150 Mbps/300Mbps, it would be great.

Any recommendation? Maybe AWUS036ACH and TP-TLW722N can supports this functionality, but I am not sure …

Thanks.

4 thoughts on - Recommendation About An Usb Wireless Adapter To Use It As HostAP

  • I would suggest use openWRT — it is designed for WiFi and the foot print is small (around 60MB). It has a lot of additional packages
    (captive portal, WAN load balancing etc.) that you can install as per your needs. I have used it on a Raspberry PI with USB WiFi dongles
    (Realtek chip set). You can conceivably run it as a virtual appliance with USB pass through to the h/w.

    On Alpha’s web site one of the slide show images show openWRT along with their USB WiFi adapter. I would suggest contact Alpha’s Tech support to get specific model number and driver (chip set) it uses. Also visit openWRT web site and/or mailing list.

    — Arun Khan

  • Alternative to consider would be pfsense (based on FreeBsd):

    https://www.pfsense.org/

    Works excellent for me (I have a few of them around).

    Valeri

    — it is designed for WiFi and the foot

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • pfSense is a very good router, firewall, but its wireless support is fairly limited. I use pfsense as my home firewall/router, but use Ubiquiti UniFi AP’s for my wireless.. this has the added advantage of letting me position the WAP’s (wireless access points) seperately for the best radio distribution (ceiling mount), while the router is on a table in a corner along with my cable modem and file server box where radio propagation wouldn’t be very good.

  • Many thanks fro your inputs, but I can’t use a real wifi router. I need this usb adapter to connect two smartphones and a raspberry pi for my day to day job. The idea is to share laptop Internet’s connection with these devices.