[vox-tech] Wireless Networking

[Peter Salzman]

I'm having a horrendously awful time getting wireless networking working on
my Kubuntu box.   I've never played around with wireless networking on Linux
before and wanted to consolidate my knowledge and see if I understand it
correctly.   My two wireless cards are:

Edimax EW-7318usg
     148F:2573 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2501USB wireless adapter

Alfa AWUS050NH
     148F:2770 Ralink Technology, Corp.

If this were wired networking, the steps I would take would be:

1. Plug in the card into the computer and connect it to the router.
2. Load the correct driver.
3. Bring the interface up and assign an IP addr, either manually with
ifconfig or automatically with dhclient.
3a. If manual was used in step 3, resolv.conf must contain the DNS servers
and a gateway must be specified with "route".

I assume wireless networking must work more or less the same way.   The two
things that are causing me grief are:

1. I don't know if the drivers are correct.
2. Security details (WEP, WPA, etc)

Part of the problem is that there seems to be a LOT of information out
there, and some of it is conflicting.  For example, which drivers to use for
these wireless cards.  When I load a driver, is there some way of finding
out if the driver is functional for the card?   It would remove a lot of the
later guesswork if I had confidence that the driver loaded is correct and
working.

The 2nd question concerns security.  If you want to use WPA2/AES, is
wpa_supplicant mandatory to use?

Since the obvious way to know if networking is functional is to ping a
remote host, if it doesn't work, it's not clear at what stage the process is
failing at.   Is there a way to detect that everything is AOK up to
wpa_suplicant without having to switch the router's security completely off?

Thanks!
Pete
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