Wifi & Networking Configuration

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Revision as of 13:29, 8 July 2007 by Elvanor (talk | contribs)
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Setting up Wifi under Gentoo involves several steps.

Get your driver working

  • This depends on your wireless card. Usually it will require very recent releases of the Linux kernel, and additional drivers or programs.
  • Once you have an interface working (eg iwconfig lists something) you can proceed to the next step.

Associating with an access point and Authentication

  • Emerge wpa_supplicant.
  • The configuration file used by wpa_supplicant under Gentoo is in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf. So edit your changes there. Sample below:
network={
        ssid="Arda"
        scan_ssid=1
        proto=WPA
        pairwise=CCMP TKIP
        psk="password_goes_here_56831"
        priority=2
}
  • The pairwise option specifies the cryptographic algorithms used for authentication. CCMP also means AES.
  • To basically test if authentication is working, launch wpa_supplicant with the -c and -i flags, supplying both a configuration file and an interface name. Example:
wpa_supplicant -ieth1 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Note that if you forget the -i or -c flag, wpa_supplicant will refuse to work.

  • Once it is working, create a symlink in /etc/init.d:
ln -s net.lo net.eth1

where you replace eth1 with your interface name.

  • Finally run /etc/init.d/net.eth1 start and if everything goes smoothly, you can add it to the default run level.

ipw3945 specific notes

  • Be careful to add the daemon init script to the boot runlevel, not the default one. Else things won't work automatically after boot.
  • Do not include ipw3945 in the list of modules to be autoloaded, let the daemon load this module automatically.

A note on init scripts on Gentoo

In fact there is only a single init script, net.lo, for the loop back interface. Other scripts are simply added by making symbolic links to net.lo, changing the "lo" with the new interface name.