HostAPD, Linux and the iPhone

In developing the Extreme Edition product, we needed a way to configure the device to connect to a WiFi access point. We figured the best way to do this was via WiFi! Getting this working was more of a challenge than we expected, but it is done. Part of the issue was that the normal version of the hostapd software would not work with our chosen WiFi dongle. This was not an issue, once we found the correct version to use.

What was harder was getting the device to work with an iPhone and iPad. Initially, this would not work. Some searching found the following link. From what I can work out, it appears that many versions of hostapd set the authentication to wpa2-enterprise rather than wpa2-psk, and this causes the iPhone not to authenticate correctly. There is a simple solution to this. The hostapd.conf file just needs to be added with the following two lines.

ieee8021x=0
eap_server=0

Once that is done, the iPhone and iPad should work as one would expect.

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