Notes on setting up Raspberry Pi 3 as WiFi hotspot

I want to sniff the packets for IoT devices. There are a number of ways of doing this, but one straightforward mechanism is configuring a "Raspberry Pi 3 B" as a WiFi hotspot, then running tcpdump on it to record all the packets that pass through it. Google gives lots of results on how to do this, but they all demand that you have the precise hardware, WiFi hardware, and software that the authors do, so that's a pain.


I got it working using the instructions here. There are a few additional notes, which is why I'm writing this blogpost, so I remember them.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/access-point.md

I'm using the RPi-3-B and not the RPi-3-B+, and the latest version of Raspbian at the time of this writing, "Raspbian Stretch Lite 2018-3-13".

Some things didn't work as described. The first is that it couldn't find the package "hostapd". That solution was to run "apt-get update" a second time.

The second problem was error message about the NAT not working when trying to set the masquerade rule. That's because the 'upgrade' updates the kernel, making the running system out-of-date with the files on the disk. The solution to that is make sure you reboot after upgrading.

Thus, what you do at the start is:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get update
shutdown -r now

Then it's just "apt-get install tcpdump" and start capturing on wlan0. This will get the non-monitor-mode Ethernet frames, which is what I want.