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Setup a WiFi Network with 'wpa_supplicant'

OCEAN IS IN BETA!

This guide applies to the Ocean BETA units that will ship in February 2016.

If you find a bug while using your Ocean and would like to report it, please send us an email about it!

wpa_supplicant is a WiFi configuration utility.

Walkthrough

Step 1: Edit Configuration Files

Use an editor to modify the file at the following location:

/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

If you want to connect to a secured network with the WPA2 protocol, copy and paste the following into your wpa_supplicant.conf file, replacing NAME-OF-YOUR-NETWORK with the full name of the network you wish to connect to, and PASSWORD with the password of the network:

network={
    ssid="NAME-OF-YOUR-NETWORK"
    psk="PASSWORD"
    proto=RSN
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
    pairwise=CCMP TKIP
    group=CCMP TKIP
}

To connect to an unsecured network, you can enter the following, again replacing NAME-OF-YOUR-NETWORK with the full name of the network you wish to connect to:

network={
    ssid="NAME-OF-YOUR-NETWORK"
    key_mgmt=NONE
}

For different network settings, check the wpa_supplicant man page.

$ man wpa_supplicant

Step 2: Restart Networking

Use ifup to bring up the wlan0 interface:

$ ifup wlan0

If this doesn't work, you may need to cycle wlan0, like this:

$ ifdown wlan0
$ ifup wlan0

Step 3: Check iwconfig and ifconfig

The utilities will print out information about your connection. iwconfig will look something like this when you have successfully connected to the network:

$ iwconfig
lo        no wireless extensions.

tunl0     no wireless extensions.

wlan0     IEEE 802.11  ESSID:"My Network"
          Mode:Master  Frequency:2.437 GHz  Access Point: 02:18:4A:05:F7:42
          Bit Rate=52 Mb/s   Tx-Power:32 dBm
          Retry min limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:off

bond0     no wireless extensions.

p2p0      IEEE 802.11bgn  ESSID:off/any
          Mode:Managed  Access Point: Not-Associated   Tx-Power=1496 dBm
          Retry  long limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Encryption key:off
          Power Management:on

ifconfig should report an IP address for wlan0 if you've successfully connected to the router:

$ ifconfig
lo       Link encap:Local Loopback
         inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
         UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
         RX packets:368 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
         TX packets:368 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
         collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
         RX bytes:103453 (101.0 KiB)  TX bytes:103453 (101.0 KiB)

wlan0    Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:22:f4:f7:c6:5b
         inet addr:10.0.30.57  Bcast:10.0.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0
         UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
         RX packets:10905 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
         TX packets:110 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
         collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
         RX bytes:2761564 (2.6 MiB)  TX bytes:11720 (11.4 KiB)

If neither of these commands produce useful output, you may need to restart networking completely:

$ /etc/init.d/networking restart

Step 4: (Optional) Test Your Internet Connection

As in the guide for setting up WiFi with the If your WiFi router is connected to the internet, you can ping Google to see if your Ocean can reach a Google server:

$ ping -c 4 www.google.com

You should see something similar to the following

$ ping -c 4 www.google.com
PING www.google.com (216.58.216.132) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from sea15s01-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.216.132): icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=20 1 ms
64 bytes from sea15s01-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.216.132): icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=23.7 ms
64 bytes from sea15s01-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.216.132): icmp_seq=3 ttl=54 time=21.3 ms
64 bytes from sea15s01-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.216.132): icmp_seq=4tttl=54 time=20.8 ms

--- www.google.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% pack l loss, time 3005ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 20.168/21.519/23.750/1.361 ms

Tips and Tricks

You can quickly append new networks to the wpa_supplicant file fairly easily with command line interface. For example, in the following command, replace SSID with the full name of the network you wish to connect to, and PASSWORD with the password of the network:

$ wpa_supplicant "SSID" "PASSWORD" >> /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

This will append the network info to the end of the wpa_supplicant configuration file. You will need to restart networking once you've done this.