Wireless connection using PSK

Ok here’s what I have

Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 4965 on my Toshiba Satellite A200 laptop and an access point with WPA encryption passkey. I’d been using wlassisstant for a while until it got crazy and I couldn’t find why.

Anyway, here are the steps that I did:

Scan for your network:

#iwlist wlan0 scanning

wlan0     Scan completed :
Cell 01 – Address: 00:12:0E:71:54:17
ESSID:”mynet”
Mode:Managed
Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
Channel:6
Quality=62/100  Signal level:-71 dBm  Noise level=-96 dBm
Encryption key:on
IE: WPA Version 1
Group Cipher : TKIP
Pairwise Ciphers (1) : TKIP
Authentication Suites (1) : PSK
Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 22 Mb/s
6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s; 24 Mb/s
36 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s
Extra:tsf=0000011929fc3094

Assign the values to the network

#iwconfig wlan0 essid mynet channel 6 key off mode managed ap 00:12:0E:71:54:17

now use wpa_supplicant to handle the encryption. The most important step here is to configure wpa_supplicant

#vim /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

network={
ssid=”mynet”
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
proto=WPA
pairwise=TKIP
group=TKIP
psk=”mysecretkey”
}

Start wpa_supplicant service

#wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

ehhh, eventually call dhclient if your AP has dhcp running

#dhclient

or you can assign the ip, gateway, dns …etc using

ifconfig wlan0…..etc