Sunday, August 12, 2007

Ubuntu RT73 and WPA2, should be simple eh?

Some months ago i built a HTPC in a shiny case of spare components I had around the apartment. For networking I used the standard ethernet and had a bunch of ugly cables on my floor. After redecorating a bit i finally managed to go wireless everywhere except on the HTPC and so I needed to fix this.
I bought two cheap Linksys WUSB54GC for about 15 dollars each and they worked great with windows, Mac OS X and FreeBSD. Now it was up to Linux to get the challenge.
My HTPC runs Ubuntu 7.04 with standard settings and a mythtv slapped on top. Nonthing fancy, its functional.
The RT73 driver that is included in the standard kernel for Ubuntu does not support WPA2(!).
So I had to google. The answers all pointed to the CVS version of the RT73 module to get it working.
So i downloaded it. Compiled and installed. A quick rmmod on and modprobe on the module brought the interface back up with the new shiny driver.
As for configuration i edited /etc/network/interfaces and added:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
pre-up ifconfig wlan0 up
pre-up iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
pre-up iwconfig wlan0 essid YOURSSID
pre-up iwpriv wlan0 set AuthMode=WPA2PSK
pre-up iwpriv wlan0 set WPAPSK=YOURKEY
pre-up iwpriv wlan0 set EncrypType=AES


And voila the sucker now works even when rebooting. No more stinking cables on the floor. Sussis is gonna be thrilled when she gets home from Stockholm.

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