Wireless Networking

<application>iwconfig</application> Wireless networking is somewhat more complicated than traditional wired networking, and requires additional tools for setup. Slackware includes a diverse collection of wireless networking tools to allow you to configure your wireless network interface card (WNIC) at the most basic level. We won't cover everything here, but should give you a solid foundation to get up and running quickly. The first tool we are going to look at is iwconfig(8). When run without any argument, iwconfig displays the current wireless information on any and all NICs on your computer. darkstar:~# iwconfig lo no wireless extensions. eth0 no wireless extensions. wmaster0 no wireless extensions. wlan0 IEEE 802.11abgn ESSID:"nest" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.432 GHz Access Point: 00:13:10:EA:4E:BD Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power=17 dBm Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2352 B Encryption key:off Power Management:off Link Quality=100/100 Signal level:-42 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0 tun0 no wireless extensions. Unlike wired networks, wireless networks are "fuzzy". Their borders are hard to define, and multiple networks may overlap one another. In order to avoid confusion, each wireless network has (hopefully) unique identifiers. The two most basic identifiers are the Extended Service Set Identifier (ESSID) and the channel or frequency for radio transmission. The ESSID is simply a name that identifies the wireless network in question; you may have heard it referred to as the network name or something similar. Typical wireless networks operate on 11 different frequencies. In order to connect to even the most basic wireless network, you will have to setup these two pieces of information, and possibly others, before setting up things like the WNIC's IP address. Here you can see that my ESSID is set to "nest" and my laptop is transmitting at 2.432 GHz. This is all that is required to connect to an unencrypted wireless LAN. (For any of you out there expecting to come to my house and use my unencrypted wireless, you should know that you'll have to break a 2048-bit SSL key before the access point will let you communicate with my LAN.)