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Going Wireless in SUSE Linux 10.0

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Get Involved > Posted: 19 Mar 2006
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SUSE Linux 10.0

Introduction

Quite an interest been expressed about working wirelessly on Linux. People want to be mobile. They like using their laptops on
the couch while watching the latest CSI episode. Several readers have requested more information on knowing which wireless
NICs to buy for their laptops and how to get them working. So, what I'd like to do is take a look at these issues from several
angles. I'll describe my own hardware, some sound methodology for selecting a NIC card, how the installation of the card went,
and how to implement security. Let's jump right in and take a look at the hardware.

What I Started With

I will be working with a laptop, specs as follows:

Compaq Armada m700

Intel Pentium III (Coppermine) 996 Mhz

575 Mb RAM
ATI Rage Mobility P/M AGP 2x
18G Hitachi HDD
SUSE 10.0 Eval

Full 'hwinfo' output here.

Initial Research

I had heard that wireless networking was still somewhat of a handful to do on Linux. Because of this, my first course of action
was large amounts of research. Were there any wireless NICs that other people had gotten to work on SUSE without any
problems? It's nice when one can just plug the card in, have YAST automatically configure it, and just work with minimal
headache. Finding such a card was my goal. I wanted to provide this information for anyone interested in setting up Wireless
networking in SUSE who hadn't yet purchased hardware.

After some digging, I was able to find three excellent resources, as follows:

http://linux-wless.passys.nl/
http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/index.php/cat/10
http://en.opensuse.org/HCL/Network_Adapters_(Wireless)

Another excellent resource that a reader brought to my attention is Jean Tourrilhes' Wireless LAN resources for Linux page. If
you would like to do some deeper research on setting up wireless in Linux, this is an excellent page that I recommend checking
into.

It was very helpful to find these resources, as I could use them to cross-reference one another. I carefully compared the
information available on each of these resources. I also contacted the developers in Germany about which card to get. They
were gracious enough to let me know that the Atheros based cards were the recommended ones.

Eventually, I saw that the Netgear WG511T was an Atheros based card, and had a great review from a SUSE user on
amazon.com. I then sought a router that would work seamlessly with that NIC. From the page on amazon.com, I saw a
recommendation for the Netgear WGT624 108 Mbps Wireless Router to work with the WG511T PCMCIA card. This hardware
also supports 802.11a/b/g, WEP keys, and WPA-PSK signal encryption. I wanted to learn more about switching between
networks, as well. With that end in mind, I bought the Netgear WG511T wireless NIC and two of the WGT624 routers; one for
home and one for work. The total for all of this was about $180.

Setting up the Netgear Wireless Router

First, I decided to get the router set up. As wireless is initially disabled, I had to connect in with a desktop using a plain old
CAT5 cable. Then, I had to refresh my IP with the following command:

After doing this, I tried surfing the Internet. The router, detecting that it wasn't set up yet, took me straight to a setup wizard. I
went through each step mostly accepting the defaults. I eventually came to a screen that was asking me for an SSID.

I'll take a few moments here to explain a little about what I learned regarding SSIDs when researching setting up wireless
connections on SUSE. First, an SSID is in some ways similar to a workgroup in Windows networking. It's just a name for a

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wireless router and its network of connected computers. Second, it's generally a good idea to change the default SSID. This
makes it a little harder for someone to find your network. However, this is only true if you turn off SSID broadcasting, which I
will explain a little later in this article.

So, I changed the default 'NETGEAR' SSID to something a little more creative: C0RND0G. I then clicked NEXT:

The setup wizard took me to a screen asking me if I wanted to enable security measures. Initially, it is easier to set up without
security. I decided that I would add it later once I knew the connection was working. Please note: It is very important to set up
security measures on a wireless connection. Unsecured wireless networks are a very common way for people to use a
connection without authorization. However, on initial installation, it's easier without the security. So, I did not enable security at
this phase of the set-up.

The router setup wizard took me to another screen, asking me if I wanted to change the default password.

I decided that this was a good idea, since at first, I would have absolutely no security on my network, whatsoever. If someone
connected to my wireless network and knew my router's default username and password, they could connect into the router
and wreak all kinds of havoc. This in mind, I clicked YES, where I was taken to a screen where I was able to change the
password. Having entered a new password, I continued with the router setup wizard.

I was then taken to a summary screen with all of the settings I had chosen thus far. It was nice to see that they had given me
the ability to print out that information had I needed to. Since I didn't, I just continued through and finished the setup of the
router.

At this point, the initial setup of the router is complete. We are now going to set up the wireless NIC on the laptop. After making
sure the connection is working, we will come back and implement security measures to protect the connection.

Setting up the Netgear Wireless NIC

Our next task becomes setting up the wireless NIC in the laptop itself. To do this, I just plugged the Netgear WG511T card into a
free PCMCIA slot in the side of the laptop. In a few seconds, SUSE recognized that a card had been plugged in, and asked me
if I wanted to configure it:

Obviously, the answer was YES, so that's what I clicked on. I was prompted for my root password, which I entered. I was then
taken to the NETWORK CARD CONFIGURATION OVERVIEW screen. I selected the new card from the list, and then clicked
on the EDIT button:

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I was taken to the NETWORK ADDRESS SETUP screen. This is to tell the system that we're using wireless and we want to get
an IP address from a DHCP server. If you need to change anything here, you'll know what to set it to. I don't need to change
anything, so I'll just click NEXT:

Another screen appeared, the WIRELESS NETWORK CARD CONFIGURATION screen. That's good, because that's what we
want to do: configure our wireless card:

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We'll leave the operating mode set to MANAGED. The NETWORK NAME (ESSID) will be C0RND0G, as I set the router to,
above. Just for now, the AUTHENTICATION MODE will be OPEN. This basically means that we are not authenticating users,
and that anyone can connect. We'll be sure and come back to implement some security for our wireless network. Just for now,
click NEXT. Good old SUSE tells us that not using any encryption is a security risk, asking if we really want to continue. For the
moment, it's ok to click YES.

We come back to the NETWORK CARD CONFIGURATION OVERVIEW screen, where we can just click NEXT. YAST saves
settings and exits.

At this point, we definitely do not need the CAT5 cable anymore, so I unplugged it from my laptop and router. This ensures that
any network traffic we send or receive uses the wireless connection.

In my case, I had to manually restart the network (done as root):

This gave me a lot of output, which we don't need to go into, here. However, we do want to make sure we got an IP address for
the card. We'll do this with the following command:

If we look, the number highlighted in green is the IP address of my new wireless card. Great, I have an IP address. To test our
connection, let's ping an outside server like google.com:

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Note: to discontinue pinging, press CTRL+C.

Looks like our connection is up and working. Let's try and browse the Internet, just to make sure. Open a browser and go to
your favorite page:

Everything appears to be in order. Our wireless connection is working.

Securing the Wireless Connection

Before we do anything else, let's make sure we secure the connection. To do this, we'll disable the broadcasting of our SSID
and enable some encryption in our router. The two most common types of encryption are as follows:

WEP Key - Older technology. Can be cracked within a few minutes by a skilled cracker. Better than nothing, however.
WPA - Newer technology. Very difficult to crack. The encryption of choice if available.

While I was looking for a wireless card to use with SUSE, I also searched for something that would support the WPA
encryption. The one I finally bought does, indeed, support this. So, I'm going to go in and enable it.

On most routers, to connect in, you just browse to http://192.168.1.1 or http://192.168.0.1/ . Generally, somewhere in your
router's documentation it will tell you how to connect to the administration panel for the router. Once logged into the router, went
to disable SSID broadcasting. This, by itself, is not a very strong security measure. It makes your wireless network less visible,
however. Low-key networks are less likely to become a target. So, I recommend doing this.

Next, I headed into the Wireless Settings to enable encryption. This particular router supports several types of WPA
encryption. My NIC supports WPA-PSK, so I enabled that one in the router. I then go down and put in a passphrase. I will put
this same passphrase into my laptop's configuration.

I then went back over to the laptop, and loaded up the wireless nic configuration once again. I needed to put my passphrase
into my wireless NIC's configuration.

To do this, we'll open YAST, select NETWORK DEVICES from the left, and then NETWORK CARD from the right:

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The NETWORK CARD CONFIGURATION OVERVIEW window comes up. We just select the wireless card from the list, and
click on EDIT:

The NETWORK ADDRESS SETUP window appears. We just click NEXT here:

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On the next page, we need to change the authentication mode to WPA-PSK and then input the WPA passphrase. When this is
done, click NEXT:

We go back to the NETWORK CARD CONFIGURATION OVERVIEW, where we just click NEXT. YAST saves the configuration
and exits.

Again, let's restart the network (as root):

check for an IP address:

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and ping google.com:

Open a browser and hit a website to make that last check.

If everything goes according to plan, you should be surfing away.

Conclusion

So far, we've looked at how to select a good wireless card and router. We've discussed how to set them both up without
encryption just to make sure they're working. Then, we went through enabling the encryption. If your router does not offer
WPA, WEP is better than nothing, and is very similar to the WPA setup. This should demonstrate how painless it is to set up a
wireless connection using SUSE Linux 10.0 as the client(s).

In a future article, I will discuss methods of transporting the laptop between two different wireless networks. This will be useful
for people who have one network at home, one at school, and one at work. Until then, hopefully, this will help get started with
integrating wireless with the SUSE Linux 10.0 platform.

UPDATE (2006-03-28): A reader, Gary, wrote in to point out the following:

"I read your article about setting up a wireless LAN connection. The article was very well written and
understandable."

"I think that you left out one detail which I've found to be the primary problem with getting wireless NICs to work with
linux: All of the NIC manufacturers change chipsets on their NICs without changing the NIC model number. As a
result, by the time someone buys the specific NIC mentioned in your article, Netgear may have switched from
Atheros to something else. Even a card that's had a good review by a linux user can be a total failure for another
user, since the same card might come in 2 or even 3 hardware revisions."

"Purchasing LAN hardware for linux is difficult, too, since few NIC technical descriptions specify the chipset used."

Thanks for the heads-up. I noticed this, also. The hardware vendors sure don't make it easy, do they? After discovering this
phenomenon, it became obvious that I may just have to ask the SUSE project managers, which is what I ended up doing,
just to be safe. Thanks again for the comments.

Reader Comments

I did such a job as well, but with use of this report this job would be more easy than it has been. Thank you for this
report.
Shouldn't the device be set to start on hotplug, rather than at boot?
Don't disable SSID broadcasting until you've got all devices connected to your wireless network. Might also suggest
your wireless card or router may need a firmware update to be able to use WPA.
This is useful if you are starting from scratch. My wireless card in built in, so this article is useless to me.
Need a follow-up article that shows how to configure a "closed" device using ndiswrapper - I have this set up on my
laptop at home using a Linksys PCMCIA wireless NIC - works great.
One small error - the WGT624 is 892.11b/g, and doesn't support 802.11a. Disabling SSID broadcast adds exactly 0 to
wireless security (the SSID is broadcast anyway - just less often). Maybe note in the article that some windows card

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drivers have trouble if the SSID is not broadcast.

I believe the information was useful and validated what techniques I was using to set up my card. The draw back is that
even though my card shows up in the driver list it still does not work correctly when conncecting to my network. I use a
Netgear WG511 802.11g card and I have to manually connect everytime I use it. And even then it is still hit and miss.
THANK YOU! I've been trying for hours to configure my Linksys WPC54G on my laptop running SUSE 10 and
Linuxant Driverloader without success. Ten min after reading your page I was up and running. Essentially, I just had to
delete all previous configurations and then follow your advice (with driverloader already installed). -mike
I'm sorry but I followed your instructions to the letter but when I type /sbin/ifconfig only the eth0 and lo are displayed. I
go back to configure the network card and the wireless card is apprarently there and configured. Advice on what I'm
doing wrong would be great.

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