How to launch hotspot at boot?

rokejulianlockhart · September 2, 2023, 11:29am

I’ve recently moved house temporarily, and the broadband connection here is abysmally slow. However, due to a ridiculous stroke of luck, this is also the only place in this country with decent 5G coverage. This means that until I can get

working again (it has 4G support) I need to hotspot from my smartphone to my desktop. However, unlike my desktop, which can broadcast a hotspot across a great distance using its antennae, my smartphone cannot, which means that I’d like to use my smartphone like the network gateway, and each device like an AP.

I can do this on Android

and Windows

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/automatically-turn-on-mobile-hotspot-when-the-pc/036f6f77-bcf0-465a-91f5-2ea51d8983b6

but not on KDE Plasma in any obvious manner, because I suppose I could configure a systemd service to invoke whatever code creates a hotspot

but that’s rather out of my league, since unlike Windows, there aren’t high-level .NET (or Win32 API equivalent) commands available.

To this end, I’d like to be able to configure all of my devices to broadcast their own network signal on boot automatically, rather than have me need to configure this at every boot.

Is this possible? If not, could I request that it be?

meven · September 4, 2023, 9:19am

I have a solution, I think.

You can script the startup of the hotspot, using the cli tool nmcli
For instance following:

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/narate/d3f001c97e1c981a59f94cd76f041140

create-hotspot.md


# Create a Wi-Fi hotspot on Linux using `nmcli`

Original post : `https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/310699`

```
nmcli con add type wifi ifname wlan0 con-name Hostspot autoconnect yes ssid Hostspot
nmcli con modify Hostspot 802-11-wireless.mode ap 802-11-wireless.band bg ipv4.method shared
nmcli con modify Hostspot wifi-sec.key-mgmt wpa-psk
nmcli con modify Hostspot wifi-sec.psk "veryveryhardpassword1234"

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Then once you have a command line that starts your hotspot, you can add it to the programs launched at startup in “Automatic Startup” add a connection script.

Hope this helps.

rokejulianlockhart · September 5, 2023, 10:04pm

~~Automatic startup? I thought Linux distributions requires an init service for anything that wants to start at boot…? (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1851337#c3 :0)~~

See

rokejulianlockhart · September 5, 2023, 10:05pm

I’m a fool.

meven · September 6, 2023, 6:59am

Automatic startup? I thought Linux distributions requires an init service for anything that wants to start at boot…?

At boot, yes, but for the user session, users can do what they want as long as they have control over it

It is specified in xdg Desktop Application Autostart Specification which means it works in GNOME and other DE the same way.

guss77 · September 8, 2023, 3:14am

If you’re into scripting the hotspot start, then this python example script from NetworkManager’s examples, might also be helpful:

github.com

NetworkManager/NetworkManager/blob/main/examples/python/dbus/wifi-hotspot.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
# SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later
#
# Copyright (C) 2010 - 2012 Red Hat, Inc.
#

#
# This example starts or stops a wifi hotspot
#
# Configuration settings are described at
# https://networkmanager.dev/docs/api/latest/ref-settings.html
#

import dbus, sys, time

our_uuid = "2b0d0f1d-b79d-43af-bde1-71744625642e"

s_con = dbus.Dictionary(
    {"type": "802-11-wireless", "uuid": our_uuid, "id": "Test Hotspot"}
)

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It is using the high level DBus API for the NetworkManager service, so once you know what it’s doing, you can implement this in any other language, including shell or .net Core