Building a FreeBSD access point

I’ve built myself an access point using FreeBSD, and it’s dead easy!

I have:
One old P200 box (96meg ram, ethernet card, 2gig disk)
One d-link dwl-520 prism 2.5 card
A fresh install of FreeBSD on it ( http://www.freebsd.org )

Then to change this box into a functional access point takes just 5 commands!

# kldload bridge
# sysctl net.link.ether.bridge=1
# sysctl net.link.ether.bridge_cfg="wi0 xl0"
# sysctl net.inet.ip.forwarding=1
# ifconfig wi0 ssid my_net channel 11 media DS/11Mbps mediaopt hostap up stationname "FreeBSD AP"

Now obviously you will want to play with it and customise it, but it will work after doing just those commands. I was impressed. For full details see:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/network-wireless.html

Rob