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:<br>
<br>Edimax EW-7318usg<br> 148F:2573 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2501USB wireless adapter<br><br>Alfa AWUS050NH<br> 148F:2770 Ralink Technology, Corp.<br><br>If this were wired networking, the steps I would take would be:<br>
<br>1. Plug in the card into the computer and connect it to the router.<br>2. Load the correct driver.<br>3. Bring the interface up and assign an IP addr, either manually with ifconfig or automatically with dhclient.<br>
3a. If manual was used in step 3, resolv.conf must contain the DNS servers and a gateway must be specified with "route".<br>
<br>I assume wireless networking must work more or less the same way. The two things that are causing me grief are:<br><br>1. I don't know if the drivers are correct.<br>2. Security details (WEP, WPA, etc)<br><br>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.<br>
<br>The 2nd question concerns security. If you want to use WPA2/AES, is wpa_supplicant mandatory to use?<br><br>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?<br>
<br>Thanks!<br>Pete<br>
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