Access point tether - no internet

  • I am using a Raspberry PI 4 with the latest Libreelec update and trying to get Access Point tethering to work.

    I am using a wired cable on LAN and want to enable an access point to connect to the internet. I can create the AP but when I connect it says "No internet access". How do i fix this?

  • ... and want to enable an access point to connect to the internet. I can create the AP but when I connect it says "No internet access". How do i fix this?

    Bearing in mind that I do not know RPi, with the information you give I can only give advice:

    - Does DHCP work in tether? If it does not work, have you correctly assigned IP clients, gateway and DNS manually?

    - Does the bridge between the tether interface and the ethernet interface work? If it does not work, then it is necessary to add iptables commands at LibreELEC startup.

    If you think that the activation of tether as an access point is difficult then it is better to forget about that. There are few cases this is useful.

  • The IP address seems to be on the wrong subnet. My router is set up on 192.168.0.1 and the IP of the Pi is 192.168.0.2.

    When I connect to the AP i get an address of 192.168.1.2 and the gateway is 192.168.1.1. So this is wrong for a start.

    I can dabble around in Linux with SSH. This is not a problem. And of course the AP is useful else I wouldn't bother setting it up. I have poor WIFI upstairs and want to connect my work laptop to this network .

  • Everything seems to be fine, your RPi simultaneously uses the IP 192.168.0.2 on the ethernet interface, and the IP 192.168.1.1 on the tether interface. For tether clients, their gateway must be 192.168.1.1. Probably the problem is in the lack of a bridge between ethernet and tether, you could try with the commands:

    echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

    iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

    iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o tether -j ACCEPT

    iptables -A FORWARD -i tether -o eth0 -j ACCEPT

    (replace tether and eth0 with the interface names of your device)

  • The IP address seems to be on the wrong subnet. My router is set up on 192.168.0.1 and the IP of the Pi is 192.168.0.2.

    When I connect to the AP i get an address of 192.168.1.2 and the gateway is 192.168.1.1. So this is wrong for a start.

    This is correct because the tether creates a NAT routed (not bridged) connection between the interfaces, so two different subnets will be used. There is no need to set iptables rules or enable forwarding as these are either handled within connman or already enabled in default config.

    It would be useful to see "route | paste" before/after the tether is enabled, and "journalctl | paste" after a clean boot, enabling the tether, and connecting a client device. Just share the URLs generated.

  • This is correct because the tether creates a NAT routed (not bridged) connection between the interfaces, so two different subnets will be used. There is no need to set iptables rules or enable forwarding as these are either handled within connman or already enabled in default config.

    It would be useful to see "route | paste" before/after the tether is enabled, and "journalctl | paste" after a clean boot, enabling the tether, and connecting a client device. Just share the URLs generated.

    Let me get back to you with some tests.

    I quickly tried connecting and did a route|paste and I get this error message

    invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xf0 0x08

    I can still connect but no internet. The firewall settings and ip_forward do not help.

  • Tailscale would not be integrated into the interfaces managed by ConnMan so when the VPN interface is brought up, no routes will be created on the host to route traffic from an AP tethered device over the Tailscale tunnel. That's not particularly hard to solve.