Boot Mode to change AP SSID

[fazer]

Background

As part of my day job I sometimes have to do a site surveys for new Wifi installs. Usually we put in a few demo AP's and walk about with a ekahau heatmapper or site survey to map the signal around the building to give us an idea on the best place to place the new AP's.

My Plan

I would like to use my Pineapple with a battery pack as sometimes power points are not available in the areas we are testing. (next month I have to survey a cold store warehouse for new wireless for handheld wireless data collection units) and it has now power sockets at the moment

I don't want to have to login to my Pineapple and reconfigure it the odd times I do this so I wanted to setup a Dip Switch to set the ESSID on wlan0 to SURVEY or something

My Problem

I have to following set in dip switch 3 in boot options but it isn't working

iwconfig wlan0 key open; iwconfig wlan0 mode master; iwconfig essid SURVEY; iwconfig channel 6

What I have done

I have connected to my pineapple over ssh to test the commands and I suspect the iwconfig to be a problem as when I run commands such as

iwconfig wlan0 essid SURVEY

I get the error

Error for wireless request "Set ESSID" (8B1A) :

SET failed on device wlan0 ; Operation not supported.

Other errors

iwconfig wlan0 key open

Error for wireless request "Set Encode" (8B2A) :

SET failed on device wlan0 ; Operation not supported.

iwconfig wlan0 mode master

Error for wireless request "Set Mode" (8B06) :

SET failed on device wlan0 ; Invalid argument.

I am not a linux guru but I do understand the basics.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Is there a listing of settings people have used on the dip switches other than those here http://wiki.wifipineapple.com/index.php/DIP_Switches and the few that are on the forum ?

Thank you

[The Bunny Man]

I have been curious about doing wifi surveying with the pineapple. What software/gps will you be using on it?

[fazer]

I will be using my laptop with the survey software on. The Pineapple will act as a signal source where we are working out where best to place access points before we run cables. Hence needing it running in AP mode and on battery

FYI

I usually run Site Survey from http://www.ekahau.com/ with a WiSpy DBx from Mettageek and an Alfa USB wireless card or Netspot on my Macbook depending on the job

[The Bunny Man]

I dug through the karma page code and found that you should use hosted_cli. This is all you should have to put into the dip to change it at boot. I tested it on command line and in dip 101

hostapd_cli -p /var/run/hostapd-phy0 karma_change_ssid "Survey"

EDIT: as long as you have your pineapple quasi near defaults it should come up with phy0 on AP mode but if not there is a karma_enable flag

Edited March 25, 2014 by The Bunny Man

[The Bunny Man]

I will be using my laptop with the survey software on. The Pineapple will act as a signal source where we are working out where best to place access points before we run cables. Hence needing it running in AP mode and on battery

FYI

I usually run Site Survey from http://www.ekahau.com/ with a WiSpy DBx from Mettageek and an Alfa USB wireless card or Netspot on my Macbook depending on the job

Thanks, I'm currently hoping to use my pineapple + battery + case as a portable logging survey that I can graph back when I have my laptop.

[fazer]

I dug through the karma page code and found that you should use hosted_cli. This is all you should have to put into the dip to change it at boot. I tested it on command line and in dip 101

hostapd_cli -p /var/run/hostapd-phy0 karma_change_ssid "Survey"

EDIT: as long as you have your pineapple quasi near defaults it should come up with phy0 on AP mode but if not there is a karma_enable flag

good job thanks just the job :)