I've searched for a thread on this, but so far I've not found one....

I have SuSE 9.1 installed on my laptop and the wireless network seems to be working fine. However, I travel a lot in my business and connect to quite a few wireless networks. Is there anything that will let me keep SSIDs and their associated keys so that I don't have to reenter them all the time?

I don't mind having to pick the network manually, but having to type the key in each time is getting tedious. An even better solution would be something that automatically chose the appropriate wireless settings for me based on the SSID being broadcast similiar to what WinXP does.

So, does such a tool exist?

David Simmons
simmond@dominos.com

There are tools, you can find them here

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_...ols.html#links

Moved: This thread is more suitable in Wireless Networking and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

I asked a similar question here a week or so back - did not get any helpful replies yet.

As we are both on SuSE9.1 ...

I am mucking about with SuSE's shell script scheme but haven't got anything solid yet.
Idea is to have a define PRE_UP_SCRIPT in /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan0
And have that script do 'iwlist wlan0 scan' and then match ESSID against
known set and do

iwconfig wlan0 key whatever essid knownssid

Which works (briefly), but then (when DHCP assigns an IP address ?)
something else re-sets ESSID back to default one and link drops again.

I thought kwifimanager had that capability....

Their docs say up to four keys per configuration. Is this not the capability you are interested in?

Hrm, my wireless card is device eth2, not wlan0. I wonder if this is part of the problem.

When I try iwlist eth2 scan, I get back "Interface doesn't support scanning : Operation not supported". Might this also be why I couldn't get kwifimanager working?

as a rule, wlanX interfaces are from using the wlan-ng drivers. If you have a prism2 chipset you can use either wlan-ng, orinoco, or host_ap drivers. I personally only have experience with orinoco's.

I would assume (not having used the app) that kwifi would work with _all_ drivers, but that may not be the case.

kwifimanager doesn't switch networks automatically - you have to set a config via GUI after
entering root password.

I found two other possibilities today - 1st is waproamd :

http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/waproamd/

and the other is a very simple thing done as perl script that runs "iwlist scan",
there is a link to it from waproamd page above.

waproamd comes from same author as a tool ifplugd which can also work
with normal ethernet - which looks a promissing way to use wired (100M switch)
when possible or wlan.

However it doesn't seem to "just work" with SuSE9.1 - the problem is
that waproamd does the obvious thing:
iwconfig ... # based on ESSID or AP MAC address
l /sbin/ifup

Snag is that SuSE's /sbin/ifup calls /etc/sysconfig/network/scripts/ifup-wireless
which re-sets essid and key - which takes link down again.
But SuSE's ifup is what takes care of starting DHCP to get an IP address.

Need to play with it some more...

If I stop SuSE messing with iwconfig on the re-entry to /sbin/ifup
with patch below and replace /sbin/ifup in /etc/waproamd/scripts/*
with:
ip link set $IFACE up
/sbin/ifup-dhcp $IFACE

Then it seems to work okay.

--- ifup-wireless~ 2004-08-25 14:41:24.664398192 +0100
+++ ifup-wireless 2004-08-25 14:41:24.666397861 +0100
@@ -74,6 +74,8 @@
quiet) BE_QUIET=yes ;;
debug) BE_QUIET=no
DEBUG=yes ;;
+ dhcp)
+ exit 0 ;;
*) debug "unknown option $1 ignored" ;;
esac