RTL8188CUS and hostapd no longer works

[nsayer]

I don't know what happened, but with the most recent raspberry pi kernel, the private hostapd build available for download no longer works. All I get is

ioctl[SIOCSIWMODE]: Operation not permitted
Could not set interface to mode(3)!
Could not set interface to master mode!
rtl871xdrv driver initialization failed.
rmdir[ctrl_interface]: No such file or directory

Everybody and their brother has a copy of a privately compiled hostapd and all of them fail the exact same way.

Has anyone gotten hostapd to work with Adafruit's wifi dongle at all with kernel 3.18.7+?

[nsayer]

Even compiling the download from Realtek fails. So... now what?

[nsayer]

It's astonishing. There are hundreds of tutorials with more or less the exact same sequence of steps with hundreds of copies of the exact same binaries (or else the exact same instructions to build them from the exact same source) and none of them work.

Nobody else on the whole Internet is having trouble with this except me? Seriously?

[adafruit_support_mike]

It may be a hardware problem.

Let's try a new dongle. Send a not to [email protected] with a link to this thread and the folks there will get you a replacement.