Thursday, November 8, 2012

Setting up WPA wireless on OpenBSD 5.2

I saw a lot of people looking at my old, very old post about wireless networking, so I am going to try post some new wireless updates.

"#" means type this command as root.
"$" means type this command as user.

Setting up WPA wireless on OpenBSD using the command line is really easy.  Having configured WPA on Slackware, Ubuntu, and Fedora, I would have to say that OpenBSD is far easier, unless of course you are using wicd.

First you will need to pick out a wireless card.  I mostly have laptops, so I use a lot of USB wireless cards.  I have had a lot of success with Hawking Technology RUM and RUN chipsets on usb cards, an Atheros ATH built in wireless card, and a Broadcom BWI PCMCIA card.

First you will need to create the hostname file in OpenBSD. 
# vi /etc/hostname.rum0

I always like to create a new made up mac address. That way if I change cards, everything should still work.
You will need to type this in.
## Change your Mac Address
lladdr 00:01:4D:87:89:AB

## Setup up the system for my wireless account
dhcp NONE NONE NONE nwid MyWireless wpakey "PASSWORD"

Save your hostname.rum0 file.  Don't worry about permissions, OpenBSD will fix those for you.

Now restart network services.  No need to reboot.  Just type the following.
# sh /etc/netstart

You should see the following: WARNING: /etc/hostname.rum0 is insecure, fixing permissions.

Your wireless should now be working. Hope this helps some of you out there.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great guide, Thanks!

Anonymous said...

thanks - so easy!

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