Okay, I'm totally confused now and don't know what to do!

On 7/7/06, Michael Crute <mcrute@gmail.com> wrote:


I would really recommend you use wpa_supplicant as IMO it is far
easier to configure and supports more access methods than iwconfig.
Since your wireless card is clearly detected it should be trivial to
setup. Check out this article in the wiki (which you may have already
looked at): http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Wireless_Configuration_and_Startup#Configuration_using_wpa_supplicant


When I boot my computer and do modprobe ndiswrapper, and then run iwconfig, I get the following (as I stated in my previous post)

>
> localhost ~ # iwconfig
> lo        no wireless extensions.
>
> eth0      no wireless extensions.
>
> wlan0     IEEE 802.11g  ESSID:"beam26wireless"
>           Mode:Managed  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: 00:13:10:99:9C:BF
>           Bit Rate:54 Mb/s   Tx-Power:25 dBm
>           RTS thr:2347 B   Fragment thr:2346 B
>           Encryption key:off
>           Power Management:off
>           Link Quality:100/100  Signal level:-60 dBm  Noise level:-256 dBm
>           Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
>           Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0


I can connect in a "clunky" fashion if I type 'ifconfig wlan0 up' and then 'dhcpcd wlan0' from the command line.

However, what I want to do is to be able to connect automatically to my wireless access point, or for that matter any available wireless access point.

So, I took the above advice and emerged wpa_supplicant.

Following the wiki, I created very simple wpa_supplicant.conf file by copying the following lines from the wpa_supplicant.conf.example file, pasting them into the wpa_supplicant.conf file that I was creating and modifying them for my own situation.

network={
        ssid="beam26wireless"
        scan_ssid=1
        psk="******"
        priority=2
}

I did put something into the psk= filed, but have blanked it out here.  From the example file this seemed to be most suited to my situation.  Right now, I haven't set up encryption on my cable/DSL router because my son connects wirelessly with his Windows computer and he'll have a fit if he can't connect until I can tear him of the laptop long enough to enter the encryption code into his wireless configuration.

Next, the wiki said to put these lines into the /etc/conf.d/net file (which had nothing in it because it assumes dhcp):



modules=( "wpa_supplicant" )

wpa_supplicant_wlan0="-Dndiswrapper"
wpa_timeout_wlan0=60

Again, these lines have been modified to suit my situation.

However, if I boot the laptop without the ethernet cable connected, it hangs when running the dhcpcd daemon.

I'm sure I'm missing something, but I don't know what.

Any further assistance would be appreciated and I apologize for having to be "led by the nose".

Regards,

Colleen