6.0 and wireless setup - documentation?

Torfinn Ingolfsen torfinn.ingolfsen at broadpark.no
Thu Nov 10 16:08:58 PST 2005


Hello!

After upgrading my laptop (Thinkpad T41) to FreeBSD 6.0, I was ready
to try out the new wireless functionality.
My wireless router uses WPA, and I use dhcp on my network.

I checked the handbook, the faq and did a search on Google for "freebsd
wireless wpa".

1) Where are the documentation?
There are man pages for ifconfig, wpa_supplicant and wpa_supplicant.conf
(BTW, that man page fails to tell you that the file belongs in /etc),
but there are no "how to set up all necessary files and config for
wireless with WPA" articles anywhere (that I could find).

2) It seems that we are missing some infrastructure bits (or
documentation) in /etc/rc.conf. I can use 'ifconfig_ath0="DHCP"' in
/etc/rc.conf to tell it to start dhclient for that interface, which is
fine. But how do I tell the system to start wpa_supplicant? 
As far as I could find out, there are no "wpa_" knobs in
/etc/defaults/rc.conf and the /etc/rc.d/wpa_supplicant script is missing
documentation.
How is this supposed to work, actually?

I can get the wireless work manually, like this:
a) in /boot/loader.conf:
   if_ath_load="YES"
   wlan_tkip_load="YES"
(I got an error message that said the the wlan_tkip modulen should be
loaded manually for now)

b) in /etc/rc.conf:
   ifconfig_ath0="DHCP"

c) run /etc/rc.d/wpa_supplicant start ath0

But how do I automatically run wpa_supplicant on startup?

I'm running 6.0-stable:
root at kg-jobbpc3# uname -a
FreeBSD kg-jobbpc3.kg4.no 6.0-STABLE FreeBSD 6.0-STABLE #0: Sun Nov  6
01:33:12 CET 2005    
root at kg-jobbpc3.kg4.no:/storage/usr/obj/storage/usr/src/sys/GENERIC 
i386

-- 
Regards,
Torfinn Ingolfsen,
Norway



More information about the freebsd-mobile mailing list