A while back I asked a question about setting my Raspberry Pi up with a bridged network connection - Wired to wireless bridge in Linux - and the answer I got worked well.
Now, I had to start all over again with the Raspberry Pi and used the setup described. But it would not incorporate the wlan0 device in the bridge stating:
can't add wlan0 to br0: Operation not supported
But if I run
/usr/bin/hostapd /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf
Then the wlan0 device is successfully added to the bridge. Could someone explain what is happening here and how I can fully automate the adding of wlan0 to the bridge?
The USB device is using the ath9k_htc driver.
As per request: /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf were based on the answer referred to above (though I had moved on to WPA and stopped using WEP), now look like this (following the answer below):
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet static
address 0.0.0.0
iface wlan0 inet static
address 0.0.0.0
auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
bridge_ports eth0
pre-up ip link set eth0 down
pre-up ip link set wlan0 down
pre-up brctl addbr br0
pre-up brctl addif br0 eth0
pre-up ip addr flush dev eth0
post-down ip link set eth0 down
post-down ip link set wlan0 down
post-down ip link set br0 down
post-down brctl delif br0 eth0 wlan0
post-down brctl delbr br0
and
interface=wlan0
bridge=br0
driver=nl80211
auth_algs=1
macaddr_acl=0
ignore_broadcast_ssid=0
logger_syslog=-1
logger_syslog_level=0
hw_mode=g
ssid=SSID
channel=11
wpa=2
wpa_passphrase=PASSPHRASE
wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
wpa_pairwise=TKIP
rsn_pairwise=CCMP
ctrl_interface=/var/run/hostapd
ieee80211n=1
/etc/network/interfaces
and/etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf