Terminal commands needed to connect to wireless network

Adrian Baker · 09-05-2007, 04:49 PM

hi there

I'm using PCLinuxOS (which incidentally is an awesome distro) on my laptop and everything works fine.

My wireless card works great and starts up automatically on boot and connects with no problem . However, I move every day from my home wireless network ('nerdnet') to my work one ('wavelannet') and I have to keep connecting manually using the PCLinux Administration centre which involves quite a lot of clicking the mouse and negotiating several screens.

If I only work at home, my laptop connects automatically, if I use my laptop only at work, it connects automatically, but moving from one to the other means I have to keep using long-winded GUIs to connect.

This is clearly a job for the terminal, but I just can't seem to connect up using the terminal. I don't understand the commands needed to make my laptop connect to either 'nerdnet' or to 'wavelannet'.

I'd really appreciate some help here. What do I need to type into a terminal if i move to a new location and need to connect to a wireless network whose name I know?

Thanks for the help.

kilgoretrout · 09-06-2007, 11:02 AM

To connect from the command line with WEP and dhcp and assuming your wireless interface is wlan0, you would run as root:

Code:

# iwconfig wlan0 essid  <insert essid name>
# iwconfig wlan0 key  <insert WEP hex key>
# dhclient wlan0

There are some gui tools to automatically manage this type of situation. The best one I've found is wifi radar. Don't know if it's available in the pclos repos. You configure each network you want to connect to in wifi radar and run the wifi radar daemon on boot; it will detect if you are close to a configured wireless network and automatically connect you to whatever is available when you boot up.

Adrian Baker · 09-06-2007, 03:46 PM

Thanks for that - I'll give it a try at work tomorrow.

thanks

Adrian Baker · 09-11-2007, 01:38 PM

Hi there

This doesn't work....

Quote:

[pclinux@nerdnet@no5 ~]$ su
Password:
[root@nerdnet@no5 pclinux]# iwconfig wlan1 essid nerdnet@no5
[root@nerdnet@no5 pclinux]# iwconfig wlan1 key **********
[root@nerdnet@no5 pclinux]# dhclient wlan1
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.4
Copyright 2004-2006 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/

Listening on LPF/wlan1/00:90:4b:54:da:10
Sending on LPF/wlan1/00:90:4b:54:da:10
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 14
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 12
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 15
DHCPDISCOVER on wlan1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 13
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.
[root@nerdnet@no5 pclinux]#

always get the same..

strange!