I'm trying to get wireless working reliably on my laptop. I have followed the
documentation, but still have a lot of questions . . . especially since it only
seems to work sometimes.
First, I'm using WPA Supplicant without the gui tools.
Second, I'm in NYC and there are a lot of networks I can use around town.
Third, Is there a way I can control the services I use from the Grub menu?
Since the laptop has a wireless card and an RJ45 jack, I'd like to be able boot
and not use one or the other. Since I know if I'm not physically connected to
a network, there's really no reason to even try eth0.
Forth, The problem. I'm not sure how wpa_supplicant works or how it should
work. The wpa_supplicant man page gives a few examples on how to run it, but
when I look at the process list it seems to be run by another program called
wpa_cli. There's also a shell script in /etc/wpa/supplicant that looks like it
can start or stop it with CONNECT or DISCONNECT.
1) Do I need to enter networks in wpa_supplicant.conf or does wpa_supplicant
scan for networks and connect to whatever's available?
2) If I have multiple networks available how does wpa_supplicant choose which
to connect to and can I specify which one I want?
3) How should wpa_supplicant be started, stopped and restarted? What should be
used for this: wpa_supplicant, wpa_cli, or wpa_cli.sh? I don't see anything
in /etc/init.d for that, but it looks like netmount may be doing it.
4) The documentation doesn't say to, but the way I got wireless working is by
creating a link net.wlan0 -> net.lo in the /etc/init.d directory. Is this
correct? I think that's why it's starting automatically when I boot too,
because I never added it with rc-update so netmount must be picking it up.
5) This is the most puzzling thing. When wpa_supplicant starts even though I
get a inet address I can't always get to the internet. Why does the panel
applet says I'm connected and ifconfig shows an inet address but firefox and
ping can't reach a site like yahoo or google?
6) For networks where I have a password, should that go in wpa_supplicant.conf
as plain text or should it be encrypted?
I think I have more questions, but this is good for starters.
Thanks,
dhk
