# [SOLVED] School wireless

## xtx

I'm trying to connect my asus ux31 to my school's internet and having trouble. My wireless card is an Atheros AR9485WB. I'm using network manager with the kde gui.

I enter in the settings that my school provides, wpa2 enterprise, peap authentication, mschapv2 inner authentication, the username, and the password. when i try to connect nothing happens. i click on the ssid and nothing even attempts to connect (that i am aware of). is there a kernel setting i need to enable or something? i'm pretty confused as i'm almost 100% certain the settings are correct.Last edited by xtx on Tue Apr 17, 2012 10:16 pm; edited 3 times in total

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## John R. Graham

Have you successfully connected anywhere?

- John

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## xtx

yes it successfully connects to my home wireless. the school's is much more secure and unfortunately i know very little of wireless / networking technologies.

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## ultraslinky

Well when the GUIs fail, i suggest you try using wpa_supplicant directly. Everything that isn't an open network or WEP has to go through that software anyway, and the GUIs esplicitly call it, if you look in top/htop you will see it  :Smile: 

For example, here is my wpa_supplicant.conf entry for my university, which has a similar configuration to yours, with WPA enterprise:

```
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant

ctrl_interface_group=0

ap_scan=1

network={

ssid="internet"

proto=WPA

key_mgmt=WPA-EAP

auth_alg=OPEN

pairwise=TKIP

eap=TLS

anonymous_identity="USERNAME"

ca_cert="/etc/asi.cer"

private_key="/etc/CertificatoASI.p12"

private_key_passwd="PASSWORD"

phase2="auth=MSCHAPV2"

}
```

You'll need to replace your certificate files and of course username and password. Also maybe you'll need to look up in the wpa_supplciant manual about what to set for peap authentication.

You can just copy paste and modify what i posted and put it in some file. Then you invoke wpa_supplicant with (as root of course, and specifying your wireless interface and conf file)

```
wpa_supplicant -Iwlan0 -c/etc/myconffile.conf
```

It should say "CTRL_EVENT_CONNECTED" if everything went fine, and you should see the network in iwconfig's output  :Smile:  If it doesn't work, well, it should spit out some interesting error message i hope  :Smile: 

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## xtx

im having a hard time getting wpa_supplicant to work. i started it by running /etc/init.d/wpa_supplicant start, and it did start successfully, but when i launch the wpa_supplicant gui, under status it says "could not get status from wpa_supplicant". when i click network->add and enter in my info i click on add and i get the error "failed to enable network in wpa_supplicant configuration".

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## xtx

i got it to work... there are still some problems.

i added wpa_supplicant to the default group and added the line: modules="wpa_supplicant" to /etc/conf.d/net 

however my home network does not want to connect when wpa_supplicant is started. it works fine when it is stopped. i'd like to have a solution that works for both without having to start/stop services depending on where i am.

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## ultraslinky

Your approach is very different from mine, i only connect to about 3-4 wireless networks so i have that wpa_supplicant script and then i bound CTRL + W to /etc/init.d/net.wlan0 start, and i use Wicd for other networks. I have no idea what the wpa_supplicant GUI is like, now i remember that "qt4" flag that tried to drag in hundreds of megas of QT4 dependencies  :Smile: 

Now i think this is getting mixed between what the GUI is trying to do, and what the tools alone want to do. What are you using to start your network? For me, i just launch /etc/init.d/net.wlan0, it automatically spawns wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd.

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## xtx

i start network manager at default, i don't manually start wlan0 at all (in fact i don't even have a net.wlan0 inside of /etc/init.d). i'm not really understanding how this works... should i be able to connect to my school's wireless even though wpa_supplicant's status is stopped? or is it normal for that service to need to be started? why can't network manager do it on its own?

i find it odd because i'm putting all of the information in 2 places if wpa_supplicant is used: both in the wpa_supplicant.conf file and in the networkmanager gui. im doubting that other gentoo laptop users need to do this, perhaps i'm taking a backwards approach to this, i'd like network manager to take care of everything.

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## BillWho

xtx,

You might want to try something along this line:

Setup up a softlevel for school the same as default and have a wpa_supplicant.conf.school in addition to wpa_supplicant.conf which would be your home setup.

In /etc/conf.d/net setup a preup function to check if school is chosen from /proc/cmdline and if it is have wpa_supplicant_wlan0 point to wpa_supplicant.conf.school.

Just a thought

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