Hostapd error nl80211: Could not configure driver mode

hostapdwifi

Hostapd keeps giving me this error:

nl80211: Could not configure driver mode
nl80211 driver initialization
failed. hostapd_free_hapd_data: Interface wlan0 wasn't started

I'm on Debian 8. I googled for hours and can't find a fix that works with Jessie.

Best Answer

I had the same issue on my raspberry-PI. I could not find any proper solution but I did come up with a slightly dirty way to solve the issue:

  1. slightly modified solution from "adrianTNT" here on Ask Ubuntu

    airmon-ng check

    and the process I needed to kill was wpa_supplicant so

    killall wpa_supplicant

  2. I had to run this command to successfully start hostapd

    hostapd /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf

    instead of the more common way service hostapd start which always failed.

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