On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 5:13 AM, Robert P. J. Day rpjday@crashcourse.ca wrote:

however, that still doesn't do it as based on what i've read online), because the access point here uses WPA/WPA2, i need to use wpa_supplicant to be able to configure the wireless interface for that.  and that's about when i got kicked out of the classroom as they were closing for the evening.

thoughts?  any advice humongously appreciated.

These CentOS wili pages will help:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops/NetworkManager

and

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops/WpaSupplicant

Akemi

On Tue, 28 Sep 2010, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

there is a CD that came with the adapters, with a Linux directory, so it was easy enough to dump that onto my personal centos 5.5 box, and run "make" which generated the loadable "rt3070sta.ko" module. and, yes, that module loads. so far, so good.

If the module builds and loads cleanly when done manually, you are half way home ;)

however, that still doesn't do it as based on what i've read online), because the access point here uses WPA/WPA2, i need to use wpa_supplicant to be able to configure the wireless interface for that. and that's about when i got kicked out of the classroom as they were closing for the evening.

heh -- wpa_supplicant is 'lightly' documented, and the process for getting a wholly text mode wireless connection, and auto-selecting between open and secure with WPA or WPA2 AP's seems like a dark art. The following is from memory as the unit in question is not physically on, and not remotely reachable at the moment

[As a bit of background, I was tempted by the price of an 'e-machine' box, while travelling and a laptop died while on the road -- the darn thing takes non-CentOS 'wl' Broadcom wireless drivers, and the 'atl1c' wired network driver, of which I solved one manually, and the other one with a package from El Repo /me waves to that fine effort ]

It turns out not to be a 'dark art' to get wireless networking on the darn thing after all, but it was not trivial, either. I reading man pages, tailing logs, stracing stuff, and so forth. Most of the effort ended up in getting the configuration correct in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf AND having to add a custom add on initscript, and did edits in /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant to get the whole shebang working properly and hands off

Quick answer is that a script to this effect ran at step S98, and basically: stopped networking stopped a running wpa_supplicant rpmmod'd an instance of my locally compiled wireless driver module re-loaded said custom wireless driver module # [ at this point the driver REALLY loaded ] [re]started the wpa_supplicant [re]started the networking

and dhcp, and the wireless supplicant basically did a: iwlist eth0 scan

... which then walked the enumeration of ESSID's and looked for a match in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf Once found, wpa_supplicant hands along the required credential, and 'magic happens'

I assume there are various GUI goop tools to this effect, but I am not much of a GUI person ;)

I'll try to remember to write this up more formally. Hope this helps

-- end ================================== .-- -... ---.. ... -.- -.-- Copyright (C) 2010 R P Herrold herrold@owlriver.com My words are not deathless prose, but they are mine.