# How do I establish wireless connection from in home router?



## unixdude (Dec 8, 2008)

I am failrly new to FreeBSD. Over the weekend I installed FreeBSD-6.4 on my old Toshiba 2100CDT (Circa 1998) laptop to experiment with. I have installed elinks via ports and I have played around a bit with the internet using my old NIC card. It uses the rl0 driver and detects very fast using DHCP. Now,

 I want to try connecting to my home router using a wireless card. I am using a linksys card and it is recognized via ath0 driver. I used the following commands: ifconfig ath0 up scan and this does bring up my *home routers name (SSID). "bee"
*
*How do I establish a connection to my home router using my laptop? using only commandline?
My home router also is wep encrypted.*


Thanks everyone for the help.
I really like FreeBSD and its been a joy bringing back an old laptop to life.


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## bsddaemon (Dec 8, 2008)

WEP is not recommended. 

Please study the wireless section in the handbook for full instruction:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/network-wireless.html


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## unixdude (Dec 9, 2008)

I did review the handbook and I was not able to get connected. I'll give it a try again but the hand-books wireless section is a bit thin. I found the NIC section of the Hand book extremely thorough. However, I'll give the handbook a try again.
Thanks for the suggestion.


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## marius (Dec 9, 2008)

If you've played with wpa_supplicant already, you will have to remember to kill it before you try using ifconfig manually, or else wpa_supplicant will reset or overwrite whatever wireless settings you do with ifconfig. I had that problem when I didn't notice I had wpa_supplicant running from an earlier config.


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## drhowarddrfine (Dec 9, 2008)

Since my laptop broke I haven't messed with this for a while.  Try and connect without doing a scan.  'ifconfig ath0 up' assuming the ssid is in your rc.conf.  Otherwise it's 'ifconfig ath0 ssid=your-router up' or somesuch.  Can't recall.

The main thing is just seeing if you can connect to your known router.  Turn off any security that might be causing issues here.  It's possible your notebook knows nothing of them.


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## unixdude (Dec 12, 2008)

*re: drhowarddrfine*

Thanks for the suggestion! I turned off security and followed your suggestion and it worked. I'm having fun with this and I just recompiled the kernel tonight. It took 9.5 hrs. I only made a few kernel changes. I like the method used to reconfigure the bsd-kernel versus linux. It seems simpler and more logical. My next order of business is to install xfree86 and get x going on this old laptop. Giving my limited ram I'll go with fvwm-crystal for the window manager and dillo for the browser.

Here are the specs:
Toshiba Satelite 2100CDT laptop
built in 1998
cpu AMD-k2 400mhz (i586 equivalent)
4 gig IDE HD
2mb of onboard video memory
Ram maxed out at 192mb.

It's ancient but FreeBSD-6.4 running just fine in the old laptop. Amazing! 
Thanks again.


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## Narimen1 (Aug 9, 2010)

Wep isn't recommended for etablishing connection
try WPA2 , it"s more secure 


			
				unixdude said:
			
		

> I am failrly new to FreeBSD. Over the weekend I installed FreeBSD-6.4 on my old Toshiba 2100CDT (Circa 1998) laptop to experiment with. I have installed elinks via ports and I have played around a bit with the internet using my old NIC card. It uses the rl0 driver and detects very fast using DHCP. Now,
> 
> I want to try connecting to my home router using a wireless card. I am using a linksys card and it is recognized via ath0 driver. I used the following commands: ifconfig ath0 up scan and this does bring up my *home routers name (SSID). "bee"
> *
> ...


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