Getting Wireless LAN Working in Linux using ifcfg and wpa_supplicant over WPA2_Personal with AES

This took me almost a full day to figure out so I figure I write down what I did for reference and for others benefit, seeing as I optimized my titles, tags and content. Makes it easier to find this site when using the searches I did to get to the information. I had to piece this together from multiple posts and instructions as each one didn’t work exactly right.

So, I recently got AT&T uVerse, and after configuring it accidentally with a WEP Open Shared Key, realized that not only is it not secure, but some devices have major problems connecting to it. Sometimes I would have a visitor with a laptop come over and the wi-fi just wouldn’t work.

I know Windows 7 has some issues connecting to an older less secure network, in fact, I have found myself having to manually configure networks sometimes in order to get it working if a network is using WEP, the automatic detection just fails. On my network however, even windows XP was failing, so it was time to change. I decided to go with WPA2_Personal using AES Encryption.

Everything was fine, all myd evices connected happily, even the linux box…taht is until I decided ot try to configure it using ifcfg and not Fedora’s built in whatever it is…

I knew how to bind eth0 style devices to my network, but I had never had to do it wirelessly, needless to say the need arose only because my wife decided that it was not acceptable to have a long wire running from the bedroom to the living room to use the extra PC as a server…hence the wireless solution! (At least now I don’t trip over the cord at night!)

I wont bother to bore with the details of the errors I was getting, so, after much frustration, here is how I figured out how to do it:

Firstly, find out if your device is present

ifconfig

Your output should look something like this:

lo Link encap:Local Loopback

inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0

inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host

UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1

RX packets:3199 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:3199 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:0

RX bytes:257327 (251.2 KiB) TX bytes:257327 (251.2 KiB)

wlan1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:FD:07:92:D9:54

inet addr:192.168.1.87 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0

inet6 addr: fe80::2fd:7ff:fe92:d954/64 Scope:Link

UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1

RX packets:7424 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0

TX packets:955 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0

collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000

RX bytes:1423097 (1.3 MiB) TX bytes:202122 (197.3 KiB)

Obviously, yours, if its not working, wont show the inet addr, Bcast or Mask. Rememebr to note the name of the wireless device, in this case, wlan1.

Then we should verify that the device is configured properly in network scripts (this is a first step, but was my final piece of the puzzle) by going to the directory and editing the file. This is both the commands and what the file should look like after editing

cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts

vi ifcfg-wlan1

DEVICE=wlan1

ONBOOT=yes

TYPE=Wireless

BOOTPROTO=dhcp

ESSID=”Command Center”

CHANNEL=2

Obviously Change “Command Center” (Geeky, I know.) to your Wireless ESSID, as well as changing the chanel. Make sure the device name is set properly. If there is nothing in this file, then add it and save it, it should have been there (mine wasn’t). There are other commands you can put into this file, look them up! But they are not needed.

Next we need to make sure that wpa_supplicant is installed, run the following:

yum install wpa_supplicant

Once that is done, run the following:

wpa_passphrase “Command Center” mypassword

Change mypassword to your actual password and “Command Center” d to the SSID of the network and it should output a key. Use double quotes when your SSID has a space in it. In this case, it looks like this when you use it.

network={

ssid=”Command Center”

#psk=”mypassword”

psk=5cdd33b91fb63436dd4fe751fe63d63b50bd37412dec1dcabb5cc7eefd5570c5

}

Save this block of text, because it is going to be inserted directly into another file next.

Next we get to play with wpa_supplicant:

cd /etc/wpa_supplicant

vi wpa_supplicant.conf

This should contain soem ifnormation in it, what you are going to do is either replace or add (if not existing) the network password information you just generated plus some other things in the network bracket included below. You dont have to copy the commented out physica password #psk=”mypassword” This is how it should look in the end:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

ctrl_interface_group=0

eapol_version=1

ap_scan=2

fast_reauth=1

network={

scan_ssid=0

proto=WPA RSN

key_mgmt=WPA-PSK

pairwise=CCMP TKIP

group=CCMP TKIP

ssid=”Command Center”

psk=5cdd33b91fb63436dd4fe751fe63d63b50bd37412dec1dcabb5cc7eefd5570c5

}

Now for the final steps

Run this to make sure that wlan1 is at the top of the list ni devices

sudo ifconfig wlan1 up

then scan for networks

iwlist scan

Next, we are going to connect to the Wireless Access Point

sudo iwconfig essid “Command Center” channel 2

Now, we need to enable/start wpa_supplicant

sudo wpa_supplicant -B -Dwext -iwlan1 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

If it stated sucessfully then run:

sudo dhclient wlan1

You should be online! Congrats! And yes, it is a lengty and difficult process but once you understand it you can do it again and again.

I would like to thank the following websites for providing clues and how to’s of their own that led me to my answer.

Alexander Conroy

Digital Nomad. Programmer, Entrepreneur. Academic, Philosopher, Spiritualist. Gamer, VR/AR, IoT & Wearables. CTO @esotech.com @tldcrm.com. Miami, FL Native

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