A while back I wrote about how much trouble I was having with the Atheros 802.11 card I was using as an AP at my house. There was much flailing and gnashing of teeth, and eventually I got something kind of kludged together that seemed to do WPA and stay up most of the time… Today I finally ran into a situation where I really wanted the multi-SSID support that the card can provide back. (I probably could have done something with multiple BSSIDs, but meh.) My son has some legacy hardware that doesn't work with WPA.
So I googled around, and lo and behold, the Linux Wireless ath5k folks added multi-SSID support to their driver about a month ago! I did the usual extended complicated dance around getting the appropriate bits, getting them compiled and getting everything set up; it seems to work OK now.
Let me know if you want information about how to configure this using the iw tool and hostapd; it's not too hard to figure out, but there's lots of places to go wrong.
Thanks to the ath5k team for adding back this important feature in the nick of time for me. Always nice to see a win like this. (B)