Hostapd with an ath5k card on Debian Squeeze

Last night our Linksys WAP54G suddenly died on us, and no matter how many times I tried resetting it, I was not able to get it back to life. I couldn't reach its default IP 192.168.1.245 even though I clearly saw that it made ARP requests to check if someone else had this IP on the network. I gave up trying to fix it and forced myself to configure the Atheros Wireless Card I have in my Soekris firewall:

00:11.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5413 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)

Most of the guides out there are outdated and mention the old non-free madwifi drivers. Nowadays, with recent kernels, things are so much easier: no downloading and no recompiling. Simply edit your /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf

interface=wlan0
bridge=br0
driver=nl80211
ssid=pupazzo
channel=1
wpa=3
wpa_passphrase=blabla
wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
wpa_pairwise=TKIP
rsn_pairwise=CCMP
macaddr_acl=0
auth_algs=1
ignore_broadcast_ssid=0
logger_syslog=-1
logger_syslog_level=2
logger_stdout=-1
logger_stdout_level=1
debug=0
dump_file=/tmp/hostapd.dump
ctrl_interface=/var/run/hostapd
ctrl_interface_group=0
auth_algs=1

One day, when I'm bored enough, I'll set everything up without any encryption and tunnel everything through openvpn. Guests will still be able to surf the net but with a very limited speed and without outgoing smtp ;)

Update: you need kernel 2.6.33.2 otherwise errors about tx phy will come up