2011-09-21

wpa_supplicant on the command line

Here's the quickest and dirtiest guide you'll see to getting connected to a WPA/WPA2 PSK wireless network from the command line on Linux. Obviously, replace the SSID, passphrase and interface (in my case, wlan0) with the appropriate settings for your configuration. I've never really had to bother with hopping on a WPA network on Linux without the GUI Network Manager before. I was surprised at how easy it was. Tested on BT5 and Ubuntu Server:

$ wpa_passprase mynetwork secretpassphrase > wpa_supplicant.tmp.conf
$ sudo wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -c wpa_supplicant.tmp.conf&
$ sudo dhclient wlan0

A few notes:
* wpa_passphrase will prompt you for a password if you don't use it on the command line. You may want to clear your history out or rely on this prompting feature to keep network credentials from being stored insecurely. You should also remove the plaintext version of the password from the resulting configuration file.

* If the SSID is "hidden" (which is actually less secure!), you need to add another line to the configuration file:  "scan_ssid=1"