Raspberry Pi Wi-Fi extender

You only need (only) a Raspberry Pi 3B+ (to benefit from 5 GHz Wi-Fi).

The Raspberry Pi 3 would only give you 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi… for other models you need an extra Wi-Fi USB dongle…

We use a running Raspberry Pi (any model) to create a new Raspbian system disk. We use a new micro-SD card in an USB card reader (because the main SD slot is used by the running system). We could have also used any other Linux system.

Download the software
We do not want to use local temporary storage to avoid SD card wearout, so we only use streaming straight from the download server onto the SD-card.

Note that the ZIP directory structure is at the end of the archive; so we use zcat for unzipping a single image file. In this way the (internal ZIP) directory is ignored…

Verify the SD card device name dmesg |tail Fast installation of Rasbian on SD card.

Please change sdx to the real device… caveat for data loss… you can overwrite any connected device on your system.

It takes about 15 minutes to install the OS image: time wget -qO- https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_latest |zcat |dd bs=8M of=/dev/sdx (you can ignore the error message; related to the ignored internal ZIP directory)

Strictly zcat is gunzip -c but it can unzip zip files as well… gunzip can  currently  decompress files created by gzip, zip, compress, compress -H, and pack.

Make sure you flush the disk I/O cache: sync

Configure the new system
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1

mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2

cd /mnt/sda1

cat cmdline.txt rcsdiff -u config.txt |grep ^\+ cat issue.txt cd /mnt/sda2/etc

cat fstab blkid

Iptables configuration
vi rc.local

iptables-restore < /etc/sysconfig/iptables

mkdir sysconfig

cp /etc/sysconfig/iptables iptables/

Configure the network
cd network

vi interfaces

First boot
Change the password! cat /boot/cmdline.txt You can see that the disk partition has been expanded.

Update the Operating system
The initial installation disk is already obsolete, so upgrade your new installation. apt update

apt full-upgrade

sudo raspi-config sudo rc_gui You need a graphical terminal...

Install and configure hostapd
apt install ntp rcs bridge-utils hostapd

vi /etc/ntp.conf touch /etc/hostapd/hostapd.deny

vi /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf (change ssid and wpa_passphrase) vi /etc/default/hostapd vi /etc/bash.bashrc vi /etc/fstab uname -a > /a-raspberry-thomas-wifi

Reboot
reboot df -h |sort free ntpq -p

Wi-Fi speed

 * Up to 120 Mbit/s in 5 GHz band with 40 MHz bandwidth in ac mode.
 * Ethernet port supports up to 300 Mbit/s

Internet links

 * https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7132514/bash-how-to-unzip-a-piped-zip-file-from-wget-qo
 * https://downloads.raspberrypi.org