Discussing Slackware wireless (using the madwifi driver)

OK folks - any comments, feedback about my madwifi package, or the Wiki information, goes here.

31-dec-2007

600 might not be the best permission for wpa_supplicant.conf.
The psk is not read on my system when i chmod 600 this file.

Hi! Pity you don't give any other info. With a mode 600 for the configuration file, wpa_supplicant works perfectly on a lot of other computers. You should check what you are doing out of the ordinary. Do you try to run wpa_supplicant as non-root? The permission is set to prevent non-root users from 'stealing' the PSK.
— Eric

as far as i can tell, i'm not doing anything out of the ordinary. wpa_supplicant is run at boot time. i haven't made any modifications to the rc.inet1 or rc.wireless scripts. i've only edited (as root) my wpa_supplicant.conf file to include my home essid and psk. chmodding it 600 prevented me from getting on my network, presumably because the file was not being read. reversing the chmod corrected the problem.

September 9th 2008 Using the trunk madwifi drivers with 2.6.26 kernel and wpa_supplicant 0.6.4, I have to use 'wpakey'. It's a program shipped with madwifi.

wpakey -i ath0 -w

This enables wpa and allows wpa_supplicant to authenticate with my access point.

Shane