I have minimal debian wheezy installation on my laptop, and I am trying to get wifi working via the command line. I have wifi working at home where I use WPA2 with the entry

iface wifi_home inet dhcp
wpa-ssid "Home Network"
wpa-psk "Home Password"

in /etc/netowrk/interfaces. I use the command 'sudo ifup wlan0=wifi_home'. However, my university wifi does not use secure wifi. So I tried the entry

iface wifi_school inet dhcp
wireless-essid "School Network"

but 'sudo ifup wlan0=wifi_school' fails to get a dhcp lease. The odd thing is that at school the commands

sudo ip link set wlan0 up
sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid "School Network"
dhclient wlan0

work perfectly. Any idea where I have gone wrong? I assume my entry for wifi_school is incorrect, but it matches the guides I have found on the web. Any help is appreciated. I think I just need to RTFM, but I can not seem to find the right FM. So a link would be most appreciated.

Ok I think I figured it out. Even though quotes around the network id works with wpa-ssid, the quotes around the id break wireless-essid. This was found via trial and error. If someone could confirm this is correct, I would appreciate it. Thanks!