I recently purchased a Dell C400 to play with various x86 Operating Systems. After mucking around with numerous Operating Systemts (Windows XP, OpenBSD, Ubuntu, OpenSolaris, Solaris 10 GA), I decided to convert my laptop to FreeBSD 6.0. Since I like to wander around my apartment with my laptop, I needed to get 802.11 wireless networking with WPA security working. After reading through the FreeBSD ifconfig and wpa_supplicant documentation, I learned that I needed to create a wpa_supplicant configuration file. After testing out a few configurations, I finally settled on the following configuration:
$ cat /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant ctrl_interface_group=wheel
network={ ssid="SSID_OF_BASE_STATION” bssid=01:02:03:04:05:06 proto=WPA key_mgmt=WPA-PSK pairwise=TKIP group=TKIP scan_ssid=1 psk="THIS IS THE WPA PASSWORD YOU USE TO ACCESS YOUR NETWORK” }
Once the configuration file was in place, I manually started wpa_supplicant with the “-B” (daemonize), “-c config file,” and “-i wireless interface” options:
$ wpa_supplicant -B -i ath0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
Once the daemon was working, I added a line to /etc/rc.conf to start wpa_supplicant when the system booted:
$ grep wpa_supplicant /etc/rc.conf
wpa_supplicant_enable="YES”
Everything is working now, and I am typing this from my wireless enabled FreeBSD laptop. Nice!