Wireless with WPA-PSK: Easier than expected.

This turned out to be easy.In my case, I’d already noted that I had an Atheros 5212 based chipset in my wireless card. It seems that this is one of the better supported chipsets in the *nix world, according to something I stumbled across while doing some research. In any case, I may have had an easier time of it than some will.

I found this thread, and between that and the examples on the wpa_supplicant.conf page from the FreeBSD handbook, it looked like there wouldn’t be much to do.

However, time has been short, and in the days that have passed while I got around to it, a similar thread started at the DesktopBSD forum.

That later thread goes into a bit more detail about the requisite rc.conf entries.

I’d like to say that I looked at each and every switch and option. I didn’t, besides a thorough skim of the FreeBSD Handbook page linked above.

What I did instead was structure my wpa_supplicant.conf file after the “home network” example from the handbook, so it looks almost exactly like this:

# allow frontend (e.g., wpa_cli) to be used by all users in ‘wheel’ group
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=wheel
#
# home network; allow all valid ciphers
network={
ssid=”yourssid”
scan_ssid=1
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
psk=”johnhasalongmoustache”
}

Then, I used the rc.conf info from the DesktopBSD forum thread linked above, except that I’m using DHCP. So the lines I added were these:

ifconfig_ath0=”WPA DHCP”
ipw_enable=”YES”
iwi_enable=”YES”
wpa_supplicant=”Enabled”

On the chance that this helps anyone, remember that “ath0″ above could be various things other than “ath” depending on your adapter.

I suspect that there are more worthwhile options to include (see the DesktopBSD forum thread), but my goal right now is to get to a point where I can add the DesktopBSD Tools, so I can turn this into the DesktopBSD install that I originally wanted. Once I get that done, I’ll worry about getting things (like this, and like my xorg.conf) perfect. For now, “working” is good enough.

Next will be installing the DesktopBSD Tools, and learning what I need to learn about doing updates.