Running wpa_supplicant and hostapd on the same machine

[Jouni Malinen]

On Wed, Apr 06, 2011 at 12:04:36AM +0100, Panagiotis Georgopoulos wrote:
>                Here is a bit of a crazy idea; has anyone run wpa_supplicant
> and hostapd on the same machine?

Yes, all the time for testing..

>                What I want to do, is be able to authenticate a machine with
> a backend AAA server and send its accounting information there, over for
> example an Ethernet connection or 3G on that same box (and not an Access
> point one hop away). So I was thinking of configuring and running both
> wpa_supplicant and hostapd to use the lo (local host interface) to
> communicate with each other for the pass over of credentials and the
> encapsulation of EAP packets to AAA IP packets, and configure hostapd (with
> the wired.conf configuration) to talk to a backend AAA server. 

I'm not sure what exactly you are trying to do, but for the
authentication part, you can use eapol_test that has both EAPOL
authenticator and supplicant linked in together with a RADIUS client
(i.e., authentication component of hostapd and wpa_supplicant in a
single program).

If you want to run hostapd and wpa_supplicant separately, you can use
them with the driver_test.c driver wrapper instead of trying to use real
wireless drivers over the lo interface. driver_test.c uses a UNIX domain
socket for exchanging the packets and events between the processes. I'm
not sure what kind of accounting information you are planning on
sending, so that may require additional changes.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA