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