Jeffh.net

So I am setting up a Backtrack 5r3 system to do some mobile app assessment.  I want to set up the system as a wireless access point and be able to capture all the traffic.  To do this I am using hostapd.  Backtrack has this as a standard package available via:   apt-get install hostapd

Unfortunately this is an older version of the program, 0.6.9 I believe, and it would not work with the ath9k I have in this system.  The program threw an error each time I tried to run it.  The latest stable build of hostapd is 1.0 and is available to download here.  The problem is that you need to install the libnl-dev package in Backtrack before it will cleanly compile. After downloading and compiling hostapd 1.0 everything was good to go.  So here are the commands to run for all you script kiddies out there.

apt-get install libnl-dev

wget http://hostap.epitest.fi/releases/hostapd-1.0.tar.gz

tar –xzvf hostapd-1.0.tar.gz

cd hostapd-1.0/hostapd

cp defconfig .config

make

for i in hostapd hostapd_cli; do cp -f $i /usr/local/bin/$i; done

Congratulations you now have a fully functioning hostapd 1.0 install that will work with the ath9k wireless chipset on Backtrack 5r3.