quietearth [General News 09.19.06]



Here's a howto on configuring your rt2500 wireless chipset under debian. This is meant to be a general overview of driver setup, but more detailed regarding the interface configuration for WEP or WPA.

First off we need to grab the source from:
http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Downloads


We're going to use the legacy driver (currently rt2500-1.1.0-b4) as the rt2x00 code is still being worked on, and I'm using a stock 2.6.8-2-686 debian kernel. It's pretty simple, just follow the instructions and install the module. Once this is done, we can bring up our interface:
# modprobe rt2500

To have the rt2500 module loaded at boot, add this line into /etc/modules:
# echo rt2500 >> /etc/modules

Now we need to grab wireless_tools. I got the source for this and compiled it myself, but this should be in the repositories, so you can either run:
# apt-get install wireless-tools
or download the source and install from:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Tools.html

Once you have both the rt2500 and wireless tools installed, we can now configure our interfaces. On a site note, I put in a module alias to rename the wireless interface to ra0, once you load your module, yours will be eth1 or something similar, so just replace ra0 with eth1 or whatever it is.

Here's what we'd put in our /etc/network/interfaces file for a static ip with WEP:
auto ra0
iface ra0 inet static
address 192.168.0.2
netmask 255.255.255.0
broadcast 192.168.0.255
gateway 192.168.0.1
up iwconfig ra0 essid ESSIDHERE
up iwconfig ra0 channel auto # or if you have specified a channel
up iwconfig ra0 key abcdef00000012345600000000

We can use dhcp here if we remove all the address/netmask/broadcast/gateway lines and just put:
iface ra0 inet dhcp
up iwconfig ra0 essid ESSIDHERE
up iwconfig ra0 channel auto # or if you have specified a channel
up iwconfig ra0 key abcdef00000012345600000000

Now if we wanted to setup WPA, we have to do some special pre up configuration to set our key as WPA isn't supported by the kernel, it's in the rt2500 module itself. The iwpriv command from wireless_tools allows us to pass the needed options.
auto ra0
iface ra0 inet static
address 192.168.0.2
netmask 255.255.255.0
broadcast 192.168.0.255
gateway 192.168.0.1
pre-up iwconfig ra0 channel auto
pre-up iwconfig ra0 essid ESSIDHERE
pre-up iwpriv ra0 set AuthMode=WPAPSK
pre-up iwpriv ra0 set EncrypType=TKIP
pre-up iwpriv ra0 set WPAPSK="publicsharedkeyhere"

To bring up our interface by hand:
# ifup ra0

And we should be good to go. You might need to make some minor changes to get this working for you specific wireless setup.

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