WiFi dhcp ip essid wep advice

otchie1 · 09-28-2005, 08:24 PM

Pretty catchall title but I fugure these snippets may save you a lot of pain.

Assuming you have hurdled the trouble of identifying your wifi, getting the module to load and sorting your firmware out then the last step is actually connecting with it.

Sometimes this bit is the most frustrating with several of the GUIs being sub-Beta quality at best.

Time to trust to the console - you only need a few basic commands (AS ROOT)

Code:

iwconfig

will tell you which ethx to use (eth0, eth1, eth2, whatever). You may have wlan0 or ath0 but you'll be used to that by now if you use an odd distro :-). WRITE DOWN THE DEVICE NAME because you'll feel silly wasting an hour after a 'no wireless extensions' error occurs on your LAN NIC. :-)

If you're using WEP then have a care about your binary & hex.....iwconfig accepets hex codes but some APs probably use binary...oh what fun.

If you are using 128bit WEP then you need a 26 element hex key in this format USE THE HYPHENS ---

Code:

iwconfig eth0 key 0123-4567-8901-2345-6789-0123-45

64 bit WEP uses 10 hex elements in this format

Code:

iwconfig eth0 key 0123456789

set your essid (in this case 'linux') thus,

Code:

iwconfig eth0 essid linux

Maybe you wanna set that to ANY if you're not sure.....

Lastly fire off a

Code:

dhcpcd eth0

Remember that a simple iwconfig with no device parameter WILL NOT give you any details of an assigned IP address...check that with ifconfig or any of the sweet monitoring apps like wmifinfo

if all else fails

Code:

 man iwlist; man iwconfig

HTH

marie@dk · 09-30-2005, 07:58 AM

Great! I was wondering how this was done in the console, so thank you

...

bruble · 12-14-2006, 06:12 PM

This may be the wrong place if so sorry but it did look the most probable as you were pretty concise above.

I am trying to get my WG311v3 NETGEAR card to have a MAC Address when loaded.
I have SUSE 9.2 Distro and use ndiswrapper-1.5 with the NETGEAR windows 98 driver. It all works very well until I start trying to put security onto the system
Although I now begin to see that the MAC address is not too secure it would provide some security.

I have looked to edit the /etc/iftab file in SUSE 9.2 but hey there is not one so where can I set HWaddr then? i.e. i could have edited the file to pass this information to iwconfig on boot but...

Hope you do not mind helping. If I need there is a better place than this please let me know.

Thanks in advance

otchie1 · 12-15-2006, 01:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bruble

This may be the wrong place if so sorry but it did look the most probable as you were pretty concise above.

I am trying to get my WG311v3 NETGEAR card to have a MAC Address when loaded.
I have SUSE 9.2 Distro and use ndiswrapper-1.5 with the NETGEAR windows 98 driver. It all works very well until I start trying to put security onto the system
Although I now begin to see that the MAC address is not too secure it would provide some security.

I have looked to edit the /etc/iftab file in SUSE 9.2 but hey there is not one so where can I set HWaddr then? i.e. i could have edited the file to pass this information to iwconfig on boot but...

Hope you do not mind helping. If I need there is a better place than this please let me know.

Thanks in advance

I maybe a little confused here.

Your Netgear WiFi card has a fixed hardware addess that is known as its MAC address. Generally this is not 'setable'. In order to use MAC restriction in a WiFi environment you just restrict which MACs can access the AP which is done via a browser link to the AP - OS neutral so Windows/Linux makes no difference.

You can discover the MAC address of you card by first issuing

Code:

iwlist

to tell you the name of your wifi device and then use

Code:

ifconfig

and read off the HWaddr.