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BazziteB
Bazzite•3y ago•
94 replies
Evening Newbs

hostapd won't start via systemctl

I'm having a weird issue with hostapd. When I run it via
systemctl start hostapd
systemctl start hostapd
, it fails with this log:
Jan 03 19:39:48 fedora systemd[1]: Starting hostapd.service - Hostapd IEEE 802.11 AP, IEEE 802.1X/WPA/WPA2/EAP/RADIUS Authenticator...
Jan 03 19:39:48 fedora hostapd[1435]: Could not open configuration file '/etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf' for reading.
Jan 03 19:39:48 fedora hostapd[1435]: Failed to set up interface with /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf
Jan 03 19:39:48 fedora hostapd[1435]: Failed to initialize interface
Jan 03 19:39:48 fedora systemd[1]: hostapd.service: Control process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Jan 03 19:39:48 fedora systemd[1]: hostapd.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Jan 03 19:39:48 fedora systemd[1]: Failed to start hostapd.service - Hostapd IEEE 802.11 AP, IEEE 802.1X/WPA/WPA2/EAP/RADIUS Authenticator.
Jan 03 19:39:48 fedora systemd[1]: Starting hostapd.service - Hostapd IEEE 802.11 AP, IEEE 802.1X/WPA/WPA2/EAP/RADIUS Authenticator...
Jan 03 19:39:48 fedora hostapd[1435]: Could not open configuration file '/etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf' for reading.
Jan 03 19:39:48 fedora hostapd[1435]: Failed to set up interface with /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf
Jan 03 19:39:48 fedora hostapd[1435]: Failed to initialize interface
Jan 03 19:39:48 fedora systemd[1]: hostapd.service: Control process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Jan 03 19:39:48 fedora systemd[1]: hostapd.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Jan 03 19:39:48 fedora systemd[1]: Failed to start hostapd.service - Hostapd IEEE 802.11 AP, IEEE 802.1X/WPA/WPA2/EAP/RADIUS Authenticator.

The file definitely exists though, and if I run the command from
hostapd.service
hostapd.service
manually, it works fine:
$ sudo /usr/sbin/hostapd /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf -P /run/hostapd.pid
wlp9s0f4u2u1: interface state UNINITIALIZED->COUNTRY_UPDATE
wlp9s0f4u2u1: interface state COUNTRY_UPDATE->ENABLED
wlp9s0f4u2u1: AP-ENABLED 
...
$ sudo /usr/sbin/hostapd /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf -P /run/hostapd.pid
wlp9s0f4u2u1: interface state UNINITIALIZED->COUNTRY_UPDATE
wlp9s0f4u2u1: interface state COUNTRY_UPDATE->ENABLED
wlp9s0f4u2u1: AP-ENABLED 
...

Changing the conf file perms to 644 didn't help, and searching for the error message didn't turn up anything about weird bugs. Is there something immutable filesystem-specific that could be causing this? hostapd was installed via
rpm-ostree
rpm-ostree
, if that makes a difference.
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