Raspberry Pi OS 12 (Bookworm) released

[Tim Curtis]

Switching horses for a bit, I'm wondering how much longer we'll use hostapd.

True, hostapd is available in the RPiOS Bookworm distro but nmcli also can bring up the WiFi interface in AP mode and provide open, WEP, and WPA-PSK authentication.

nmcli is a bit of a Swiss Army knife when it comes to networking; an advantage to using it is all the configuration-related stuff is kept under one roof.  nmcli can switch among the defined connections with a single command.

Case in point:

At the moment, my pi400 has two WiFi connections defined: blitch, which is my LAN AP SSID, and blonch, which is the SSID I defined for the pi400 in AP mode (SSIDs changed to protect the innocent).


With the pi400 WiFi interface in infrastructure mode and connected to the LAN AP, I can switch the interface to AP mode simply by entering

Code:

sudo nmcli connection up blonch

and similarly to switch back to bletch in infrastructure mode.

If an Ethernet connection happens to be present, it remains up.

Cool beans.

Regards,
Kent

Can you post blonch.nmconnection file? 
I'd like to see what key/value pairs are present for an AP mode configuration.
Thx.