What I hope to accomplish: To start my wireless connection automatically at boot.

What I've done:
- Appended the following to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-wireless
- I can manually start my wireless by using ifup wlan0

Problems I've encountered, and would also like to resolve:
- Simply starting the wpa_supplicant service through 'service wpa_supplicant start' does not seem to work. The service starts, but the connection is not established.
- I have to run 'dhclient wlan0' to get my DHCP address. Sometimes, running it directly after 'wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf' it tells me dhclient is already running. I have to kill the running process, then rerun dhclient to get my address. I don't think this is related to the fact that I run dhclient in ifup-wireless, because the same happens if I just run "wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf"

so... you can or cannot start wireless manually with ifup wlan0?

If so, then, add that line to the bottom of /etc/rc.local

Sort of ... It's seems like when I start "wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf" it automatically starts dhclient, which doesn't work. So I kill that process, then run dhclient manually.

I actually managed to get it working last night by going into system-config-network and setting wlan0 to start on bootup. But I want to know what changes were made to startup config that allowed it.

Good luck figuring that out. Fedora has it's own scripts, you'll have to hunt through those. Though there may be ~/.rc.local but I forget where the "startup programs" get put.