WiFi AP with Edimax EW-7811Un

Heyho!

I don't know if this is the right place for this, but:

I (accidentally) bought an Edimax EW-7811Un instead of the EW-7711UAn listed in the compatibility list. I went through a lot and nearly gave up on it, BUT: I got it to work, finally!

I mainly followed this Tutorial, but compiled the much newer version of the hostapd/driver from source. The link is included in the tutorial, somewhere in the hostapd part. You need the right chipset of course, the realtek site is rather...confusing.

The important part after that is to prevent the hostapd from being updated, we can do this by modifying (or creating) /etc/pacman.conf and adding

IgnorePkg=hostapd

as described here.

My hostapd.conf looks something like this (sorry for the stuff in there, some testing):

interface=wlan0
#driver=rtl8192cu
driver=rtl871xdrv
#driver=nl80211
#################
ssid=PirateBox - Share Freely
channel=1
#wmm_enabled=0
#wpa=1
#wpa_passphrase=ConroyPi
#wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
#wpa_pairwise=TKIP
#rsn_pairwise=CCMP
#auth_algs=1
macaddr_acl=0
##########
#hw_mode=g
#channel=1
#auth_algs=1
#ieee80211n=1

The important part is the driver. I don't think we need to bridge the interfaces (and it's not as simple in arch as in other distributions?), but enlighten me on this one if I'm wrong.

I still need to see if I can tweak anything, but with this setup I get a speed from RPi->Laptop of 600KB/s as reported by wget when downloading a shared file.


So, back to the beginning: I don't know if this is the right place, but I think we can add the EW-7811Un to the list of compatible WiFi dongles. It's damn small, doesn't need a powered hub in my current setup and works somewhat well.


I hope this helps anyone going through the same issues.