<DIV>I'm trying to get wireless working reliably&nbsp;on my laptop.&nbsp; I have followed the documentation, but still have a lot of questions . . . especially since it only seems to work sometimes.</DIV>
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<DIV>First, I'm using WPA&nbsp;Supplicant without the gui&nbsp;tools.</DIV>
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<DIV>Second, I'm in NYC and there are a lot of networks I can use around town.</DIV>
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<DIV>Third, Is there a way I can control the services I use from the Grub menu?&nbsp; Since the laptop has a wireless card and an RJ45 jack, I'd like to be able boot and not use&nbsp;one or the other.&nbsp; Since I know if I'm not physically connected to a network, there's really no reason to even try eth0.</DIV>
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<DIV>Forth, The problem.&nbsp; I'm not sure how wpa_supplicant works or how it should work.&nbsp; The wpa_supplicant man page gives a few examples on how to run it, but when I look at the process list it seems to be run by another program called wpa_cli.&nbsp; There's also a shell script in /etc/wpa/supplicant that looks like it can start or stop it with CONNECT or DISCONNECT.</DIV>
<DIV>1) Do I need to enter networks in wpa_supplicant.conf&nbsp;or does wpa_supplicant scan for networks and connect to whatever's&nbsp;available?</DIV>
<DIV>2) If I have multiple networks available how does wpa_supplicant choose which to connect to and can I specify which one I want?</DIV>
<DIV>3) How should wpa_supplicant be started, stopped&nbsp;and restarted?&nbsp;&nbsp;What should be used for this:&nbsp; wpa_supplicant, wpa_cli, or wpa_cli.sh?&nbsp; I&nbsp;don't see anything in /etc/init.d for that, but it looks like netmount&nbsp;may be doing it.</DIV>
<DIV>4) The documentation doesn't say to, but the way I got wireless working is by creating a link net.wlan0 -&gt; net.lo in the /etc/init.d directory.&nbsp; Is this correct?&nbsp; I think that's why it's starting automatically when I boot too, because I never added it with rc-update so netmount&nbsp;must be picking it up.</DIV>
<DIV>5) This is the most puzzling thing.&nbsp; When wpa_supplicant starts even though I get a inet&nbsp;address I can't always get to the internet.&nbsp; Why does the panel applet&nbsp;says I'm connected and ifconfig&nbsp;shows an inet&nbsp;address but firefox&nbsp;and ping can't reach a site like yahoo&nbsp;or google?</DIV>
<DIV>6) For networks where I have a password, should that go in wpa_supplicant.conf&nbsp;as plain text or should it be encrypted?</DIV>
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<DIV>I think I have more questions, but this is good for starters.</DIV>
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<DIV>Thanks,</DIV>
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<DIV>dhk</DIV>