How to setup WLAN security in SuSE Linux
by Volker Weber
I remember chatting with Wolfgang who was unable to find out where he could enter his WEP key in SuSE Linux. So here is a short (?) roadmap how to get there.
- Open YaST
- When prompted enter the root password
- Select Network Hardware
- Select Network Card Configuration
- Look for already configured devices and select your card
- Click on Change
- Click on Edit
- Click on Advanced
- Select Hardware Details from the dropdown list
- Click on Wireless Settings
- Make sure you have selected Managed (default since 9.1)
- Enter the SSID
- Enter the WEP key
- Leave the other fields empty
- Now click on numerous Continue and Finish buttons
I guess the programmer doubles as the Easter Bunny in the spring. :-)
Comments
Now, that's just the easy half of the story. Go ahead and tell the poor guy how to make DHCP work with his wireless adapter so that it will not only get an IP address but also adjusts the addresses for DNS server and standard gateway ;-)
Don't have any DHCP problems. Is that because the WLAN card is eth0?
Yup.
Long answer:
SuSE in their unmatched wisdom chose to decide that wireless adapters (at least the ones that are plugged into the system and therefore can't be ethX) are network adapters second class. So what they did was to configure the network services in such a way that a wireless adapter when plugged into the system won't interfere with the settings that were eventually set by any probably running "real" ethernet adapters. Thus, if you want to configure a notebook with integrated ethernet adapter (and probably most if not all of the notebooks that use a PCMCIA WLAN adapter) to get all the settings via DHCP, you will have to manually edit /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-<whatever_your_wlan_adapter's_interface_is> and add the following line:
DHCLIENT_PRIMARY_INTERFACE='yes'
And no, this setting isn't available anywhere in Yast2.
I don't know if this is the right place but since we are on the topic of "how do to things in suse" - how do I get the laptor to suspend to disk when I close the lid?
I try 'apm -s' but it returns with "No APM support in kernel" - I would have thought the installer would have looked at the hardware, discovered that it was a laptop and sorted out all the apm stuff?
Can I propose a new thread, top five things about mac osx? To start:
1. Network profiles - being able to change my IP address at a click of a button
2. Expose - Need I say more?
Feel free to add more :)
