Assuming your wireless card is supported by the drivers included with the Fedora 11 distribution, the ipw2200 project, or the madwifi project, then configuring your wireless card is a fairly painless process.
The first problem is to determine the name of the device
(eth0, eth1,
ath0, etc) which Linux associates with your
wireless card. After inserting your wireless card into your
system, you can use the iwconfig command to
determine its device name.
Figure 7.1. Using "iwconfig" To Find A Wireless Card
[root@probe root]#iwconfig 2>&1 | grep 802eth1 IEEE 802.11b ESSID:"" Nickname:"Prism I"[root@probe root]#
The above shows the output for my old D-Link DWL-650
802.11b wireless card. Notice, how the system assigned it a
standard looking Ethernet device name. This is not the case for
cards supported by the madwifi project. These cards
currently show up with a device name like
ath0 as shown below:
Figure 7.2. Using "iwconfig" To Find A madwifi Card
[root@probe root]#iwconfig 2>&1 | grep 802ath0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"bogus" Nickname:"localhost.localdomain"[root@probe root]#
Starting with release 1.5.0 of the
NST, we are including the "next generation" drivers from the
madwifi project. You will still see the
"ath0" interface, but you will also see a
"wifi0" interface. And if you start
kismet, it will create it's own "virtual"
interface. These new drivers make it possible to use a single
card in both managed mode and monitor mode simultaneously
(though I'd avoid channel hopping). See http://www.madwifi.org/
for further details on these new "next generation"
capabilities.
Once you determine the device name of your wireless card,
you will need to create the appropriate configuration file under
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts. The
following shows how one could create the necessary configuration
for the wireless card and then restart the network drivers to
enable the card.
Figure 7.3. Creating A Wireless Configuration File
[root@probe root]#cdnet[root@probe network-scripts]#cp nst-eth0.dhcp ifcfg-ath0[root@probe network-scripts]#vim ifcfg-ath0DEVICE=ath0BOOTPROTO=dhcp ONBOOT=yesESSID="bogus" MODE="Managed" RATE="auto":wq[root@probe root]#cat >| keys-ath0KEY="FEDCBA9876543210123456789A" ^D[root@probe root]#chmod 600 keys-ath0[root@probe root]#service network restartShutting down interface ath0: [ OK ] Shutting down loopback interface: [ OK ] Setting network parameters: [ OK ] Bringing up loopback interface: [ OK ] Bringing up interface ath0: [ OK ] Bringing up interface eth1: [ OK ][root@probe root]#