My network uses “WPA/WPA2 Personal” security.
I took a look at wpa_cli --help, and good grief! That’s overwhelming. It looked like maybe getting the current status might help figure out what some of the options were, but:
[ken@lat6530 ~]$ wpa_cli status
Failed to connect to non-global ctrl_ifname: (nil) error: No such file or directory.
The help output also said the default path was: /var/run/wpa_supplicant, but that doesn’t exist. (Default path to what, by the way?) I also tracked down what appears to be the main config file, but that just added to the confusion…
[ken@lat6530 wpa_supplicant]$ pwd
/etc/wpa_supplicant
[ken@lat6530 wpa_supplicant]$ sudo cat wpa_supplicant.conf
[sudo] password for ken:
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=wheel
[ken@lat6530 wpa_supplicant]$ cd /var/run
ken@lat6530 run]$ ls wpa_supplicant
ls: cannot access ‘wpa_supplicant’: No such file or directory
So then I went back to the 2.9 version of wpa_supplicant, to get back on line. I looked at /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf to see what it looked like when things were working, and … it hadn’t changed. So okay, let’s look at what this /var/run/wpa_supplicant looks like. And it’s still not there!
So as it stands, the config file in /etc is the same for both versions of wpa_supplicant, and the the file in /var/run/ pointed to by the config doesn’t exist for either version of wpa_supplicant. And I still have no idea how to use the wpa_cli command to connect to my wifi network. This is the most complicated aspect of Linux that I have faced thus far, and I admit that it is winning.
As for the wpa_passphrase command, that just turns an ascii passphrase into a PSK, which is supposed to go into wpa_supplicant.conf. But since there’s no PSK in the conf file when wpa_supplicant version 2.9 is running (and working) I doubt that’s where I need to focus.
Thanks for listening to my whining. While I would, of course, love to have someone just wave a magic wand and make it all better, I’m willing to study this beast myself, but I’d appreciate some guidance as to how to approach it. Is there, perhaps, a good overview of how wifi, supplicants, drivers, and other things I haven’t heard of yet all fit together to make a connection?
Thanks!
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