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Setting Up an Access Point

This part of the guide will show you how to set up wimoved on your OpenWrt Access Point.

Info

OpenWrt is available for a large number of different types of access points. Different APs may use different processor architectures. For this reason, you need a version of wimoved that is compatible with your architecture.

We try to provide builds for as many architectures as reasonably possible. If you have OpenWrt hardware you would like to see supported, please open an issue.

Tip

The AP needs to have an internet connection to be able to install dependencies.

Preparing Your AP

  1. Verify that you have SSH connectivity to the access point. If not, take a look at the OpenWrt guide for SSH.

Info

Unless specified otherwise, all commands given in this guide should be run in the shell of the Access Point.

Setting Up Hostapd

Installing The Correct Version of Hostapd

Regular OpenWrt setups come with a stripped-down version of hostapd called wpad or wpad-mini. These do however not come with all features we require for our setup.

  1. Uninstall the unneeded wpad-mini 
    opkg update
opkg remove wpad-mini
opkg install hostapd
  2. Reboot the Access Point

Configuring Hostapd

OpenWrt generates the hostapd configuration file hostapd.conf from the OpenWrt wireless configuration. This configuration can be edited via the web interface or by modifying the file located at /etc/config/wireless. We will now guide you on how to set up hostapd on your AP.

  1. Go to the web interface of the AP and configure a WPA2-PSK wireless network for each radio you wish to use. Make sure to press save at the end.

  2. Open the file /etc/config/wireless in a text editor.

    Tip

    OpenWrt only comes with a version of vi out of the box. If you are not comfortable with vim, you can also install the nano editor by running 

    opkg update && opkg install nano

  3. Go to the end of the file. There, you should find a section for each wireless network you configured in the previous step.

  4. Add the following lines to each of these sections and save the file.

    option isolate '1'
option per_sta_vif '1'
option vlan_file '/etc/hostapd.vlan'

  5. Create a file called /etc/hostapd.vlan with the following content

    *   vlan#

  6. Restart the AP

When connecting to the Wi-Fi network you just created, you should see that an interface with the name vlan* gets created where * is an arbitrary number. The interface should disappear after the station disconnects. If you do not see the interfaces, recheck that you followed the guide exactly.

Setting Up FRR

FRRouting is used to enable the control plane of the underlying VXLAN EVPN networks. It needs to be installed on each AP and configured to talk to the route reflector in your network.

  1. Install frr by running

    opkg update && opkg install frr-bgpd frr-zebra frr-watchfrr frr-vtysh

  2. Create the file /etc/frr/frr.conf with the following content and replacing the placeholders with the corresponding IP addresses in your network:

    /etc/frr/frr.conf 
    log syslog informational
ip nht resolve-via-default
ip6 nht resolve-via-default
router bgp 65000
bgp router-id <YOUR AP IP>
no bgp default ipv4-unicast
neighbor fabric peer-group
neighbor fabric remote-as 65000
neighbor fabric capability extended-nexthop
neighbor fabric ebgp-multihop 5
! BGP sessions with route reflectors
neighbor <YOUR ROUTE REFLECTOR IP> peer-group fabric
!
address-family l2vpn evpn
neighbor fabric activate
advertise-all-vni
exit-address-family
!
!

  3. Create the file /etc/frr/daemons with the following content:

    /etc/frr/daemons 
    bgpd=yes
ospfd=no
ospf6d=no
ripd=no
ripngd=no
isisd=no
pimd=no
ldpd=no
nhrpd=no
eigrpd=no
babeld=no
sharpd=no
pathd=no
pbrd=no
bfdd=no
fabricd=no
vrrpd=no


vtysh_enable=yes
zebra_options="  -A 127.0.0.1 -s 90000000"
bgpd_options="   -A 127.0.0.1"
ospfd_options="  -A 127.0.0.1"
ospf6d_options=" -A ::1"
ripd_options="   -A 127.0.0.1"
ripngd_options=" -A ::1"
isisd_options="  -A 127.0.0.1"
pimd_options="   -A 127.0.0.1"
ldpd_options="   -A 127.0.0.1"
nhrpd_options="  -A 127.0.0.1"
eigrpd_options=" -A 127.0.0.1"
babeld_options=" -A 127.0.0.1"
sharpd_options=" -A 127.0.0.1"
pbrd_options="   -A 127.0.0.1"
staticd_options="-A 127.0.0.1"
bfdd_options="   -A 127.0.0.1"
fabricd_options="-A 127.0.0.1"
vrrpd_options="  -A 127.0.0.1"

  4. Restart frr by running service frr restart.

You can check the configuration of FRR using the vtysh command. This command provides a stateful shell to manipulate FRR. More detailed documentation about vtysh can be found here.

Setting Up wimoved

wimoved is the daemon we provide that enables all Access Point features required for WiMoVE. It as well as all other dependencies need to be installed in every AP in your Wi‑Fi system.

Obtaining the Correct Binary

  1. Find out which architecture your access point uses by looking it up on the OpenWrt Table of Hardware.
  2. Get the package for the matching architecture for your access point. There are three ways to achieve this:
    1. Download the binary from the latest release on the Releases Page
    2. Download the binary from a recent pipeline run in our GitHub Repository
    3. Cross-Compile it yourself. See the Development Guide for details.

Copying Wimoved to Your AP Via SSH

Info

The commands in this section need to be run on your computer, not the AP

  1. Copy the package from your computer to the access point via SCP

    scp -O <Path to WiMoVE on your machine> root@<YOUR AP IP-ADDRESS>:

  2. Login to you AP via ssh

    ssh root@<YOUR AP IP-ADDRESS>
    All further commands will now again need to be run on your AP.

Installing Wimoved

  1. Install the package on your access point via

    opkg update && opkg install <Path to wimoved>`

  2. Run wimoved. You should see an error message, showing that wimoved was installed successfully.

Configuring Wimoved

The wimoved config file is located at /etc/wimoved/config. Before we can use the AP, you need to fill this file with some information about your installation.

  1. Create a file located at /etc/wimoved/config and fill it with the following lines: 
    # The location of the hostapd sockets. Leave like this for regular OpenWrt setup
hapd_sockdir=/var/run/hostapd
# Access group for hostapd sockets. Leave unchanged.
hapd_group=network
# Interval (seconds) after which interfaces for disconnected stations are removed
cleanup_interval=30
# Number of VNIs the stations are assigned to. wimoved will use VNI 1 to n.
max_vni=20

Info

There are some more configuration options that can be found in the GitHub repository's readme file. If you have any configuration needs that are not provided by the current configuration options, feel free to open an issue.

After a successful configuration, you can run wimoved and it should start without any errors. When connecting with a client, you should see log messages.