Best method to get a stack of Pi's connected to 'Head' Pi with wifi access?

[stormduck]

I'm going round in circles with this, primarily due to /etc/network/interfaces being defunct in Stretch and i'd rather learn to use the up to date method.

My intention was to connect pi's to a switch, with one of them having a longer distance usb wifi connection, and using this pi via it's eth0 port to give the others internet access (wlan1).

I've tried setting up isc-dhcp-server then assigning the ip's but the tutorials are old and alter /interfaces so that was no good. I've got the wireless connection running fine on the one pi, then I've tried setting a static ip for eth0 in etc/dhcpcd.conf but it doesn't work. I tried 'sudo ip addr add 192.168.2.1/24 dev eth0' which works but then it loses it on a reboot.

The other pi's haven't turned up yet so i've been trying to get the 'head'' one ready. I've set up port forwarding for both wlan0 and wlan1 as i can't seem to get one to connect to the router but not the other, but i can't see it working if i can't get an ethernet ip to stick!

Spent too long on this and my brain is frazzled!
Any help would be much appreciated!

[SurferTim]

First, get a normal access point working. I use dnsmasq rather than the isc-dhcp-server. Follow this guide. Use the NAT version.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentati ... s-point.md

[stormduck]

Thanks mate I did read your tutorial on this from reading a shed load of other posts across a lot of forums! If it works well then i'll ditch the switch and wires idea. is there a way of maintaining the lease for each allocated ip address, or actually fixing the ip in place once it's allocated? I'd like to ssh into each pi and keeping the same ip despite restarts would be very useful! I spent way too much time on this yesterday and just mangled my brain! Thanks for the help!

[stormduck]

Grrr, just followed the tute word for word on fresh jessie stretch lite install and wouldn't work (didn't carry out the bridge portion) the fact that it's lite shouldn't make a difference if the right packages are installed? Did manage to get wlan0 on a static ip though woo! Searched for the newly created access point on my mac and an iPhone and it didn't exist, made sure the services were started. I can't see how having nothing connected to eth0 would mean the pi not creating the access point? Guess i'll have to wait till i can set the switch up with another pi, then really i should be able to set static ip addresses and just set up a bridge between eth0 and wlan0? Ideally wlan1 but one step at a time!