Introducing AAP 2.0

There is a good reason that I was rather silent the last days. Behind the scenes, I’ve been working hard on a major version upgrade for AAP. That said, AAP 2.0 snapshot release 100202 will be available very soon for your convenience as part of the Piranha firmware. As of today, AAP legacy isn’t maintained any longer and the AAP documentation is updated to explain the AAP 2.0 feature set and configuration.

What’s new?

Parsing iwlist output has turned out to be very unreliable in recent OpenWrt trunk. Thus AAP legacy detected every encrypted network as WEP instead of properly differentiating between WEP, WPA and WPA2. With AAP 2.0, the whole aap_scan() function has been re-written from scratch in order to use wlanconfig output and to get rid of iwlist dependency. In order to achieve this, OpenWrt madwifi has been slightly patched for AAP 2.0.

That’s all?

By no means! AAP legacy had the rather unpleasing design flaw to use “*” as a delimiter while parsing iwlist output and attempting to connect to suitable APs found in range. With AAP 2.0 this is no more. Now you’re able to use AAP with SSIDs and passwords that may cover the complete ASCII character set incl. “*”. Also, the awk helper script scan.awk shipped with AAP legacy is now obsolete as the whole scanning is done with the re-written aap_scan() function only.

Other than that, AAP 2.0 ships (so far) with the very same feature set as AAP legacy actually did. It’s kind of a heart transplanting version upgrade so to speak. Kudos for support go to some very friendly people at the #awk IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. That’s it, have fun!