Hi @petercek, I ran into this same problem. Normally it wouldn’t matter except that I wanted the same IP address assigned when my unit wasn’t mobile. This meant that for DHCP to work the MAC address had to be the same every time I booted the RPi. One fix is found in this thread: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=198946
Since I was only using one USB WiFi dongle I ended up just editing the /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf file to have the lines
interface=wlan1
driver=nl80211
at the top of the file. The driver line matches the USB dongle I have and puts it on wlan1 leaving wlan0 for the internal WiFi of the RPi 3B+.
Well…I updated my RPi and it killed the access point side of things! I did a new install on another RPi, let it update, and manually setup the access point and it failed again. When I ran “sudo systemctl start hostapd” it gave some error about hostapd.??? was masked. Apparently there has been a change with hostapd? I’m not sure what to do to fix it so I setup the RPi without allowing it to update so I at least have my mobile station connecting to the internet. Any suggestions?
For the USB WiFi side of things I have an Edimax N150 model EW-7811Un and another one that has an external antenna but uses the same WiFi chip. Both are 2.4GHz only devices.
I did the update tonight and saw two warnings about etc/default/hostpad being depreciated and something about the service being masked and the need to have it manually reset.
hostapd.conf has been moved to etc/hostapd
I just ran the update again and didn’t get the warning so the update did change something but my system continued to work.
Both of the warnings were dated 2017 so I am confused as to why it just showed up tonight.
On a side note, I am seeing a lot of updates on the RPi, Nodejs and NPM dealing with security. This has caused a few issues and caused some systems to fail.
I actually use the built-in Wi-Fi + a USB Wi-Fi dongle to have 2 wireless interfaces (one for access point, one for internet access). I bought an officially supported dongle from ThePiHut but has this Realtek chipset which may not be very reliable.
I followed instructions how to set up the access point but none of them worked. I manually started the hostapd and I managed to see my new access point but it wouldn’t let me connect to it. After some time, it disappeared. I assume it has some power management enabled but was not able to turn it off.
Maybe my dnsmasq is not set properly or something else is missing.
That worked and when I ran “sudo systemctl start hostapd” the access point came up and is working again but on a reboot it doesn’t start up again. Furthermore, ArchiveSW is still not reachable even though I can ssh and VNC into the RPi.