Learn how to – Connect To WPA/WPA WIFI network in Linux from terminal

Learn how to – Connect To WPA/WPA WIFI network in Linux from terminal.

Connecting to a network via Linux Terminal is as sweet as candy. Have you bumped into issues and unknown errors while trying to connect to WIFI network before?. If so, then you have to learn how to do it on command line interface. Some Linux flavors  and distributions will fail to connect to wifi network at some point but using Terminal to connect to WIFI network never fails.
If you’ve just installed your Linux, we have a lot of tutorials on How to for Linux.

This tutorial is universal and will work well on most Linux distros out there, both old and future releases. It also work well on both WPA/WPA2 wireless networks.

These are the tools you would require to connect to wireless network in Linux’s command line terminal.

1) Ping
2) ip
3) iw
4) wpa-supplicant

Brief summary of the tools mentioned.

IW

It is anew 802.11 base CLI configuration utility for all wireless devices. It has support for all new drivers that have been added to the kernel recently.

IP

It stands for Internet protocol. It is a utility in Linux used to test and show routing ,devices,policy routing and tunnels.

Linux WPA/WPA2/IEEE 802.1X SUPPLICANT

Supplicant is the IEEE 802.1X/WPA component uses at the client station. Its purpose is implementing key negotiation with a WPA Authentication and Controlling roaming and IEEE 802.11 authentication and association Wlan drivers.

PING

Utility used to test whether destination host is live or dead. It uses ICMP echo messages.

Step 1: Finding all available Wifi and adapters.

Begin by finding all available Wifi and adapters with iw command . 

 # iw dev
  phy #1
  Interface wlan0
  ifindex 4
  wdev 0x1
  addr 00:27:10:0e:b3:54
  type managed

Wlan0 is the device names. Phy#1 is the designated name. Type managed means it is client that connects to AP.
ifindex 4 means is as per connected port.

Step 2: Check Device Status

To check if the wireless device is up or not, we use the following command.

# ip link show wlan0

The output show us Wlan0 as up and wlan1  as down.

Step 3: Bring up the wifi interface

Use the following command

sudo ip  link set wlan0 up

Step 4: Check connection status

Use the following command to check connection status

iw wlan0 link

To find all WIFI networks detected, type the following command on the terminal.

iw wlan0 scan

Step 5: Generate WPA/WPA2 config file

Now generate config file for wpa-supplicant that contains pre-shared key for all wifi network

$ sudo vim /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
wpa_passphrase SSID_name 

Step 6: Connect to WPA/WPA2 wifi network

Use wpa_supplicant command to connect to wifi network:

sudo wpa_supplicant -B -D wext -i wla0 -C /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

• -D specifies the wireless driver wext generic driver.
• -C gives the actual path of config file
• -B runs the wpa_supplicant on the background.

Step 7: Get IP address fro DHCP server

Request for IP Address on the interface:

sudo dhclient wlan0

Verify IP address with the ifconfig command.

ifconfig -a

Step 8:  Add default routing rule

Add default routing rule to make sure you have correct routing rules:

sudo ip route show default via 10.0.0.40 dev wlan0 10.0.0.0/24 dev wlan0 proto kernel scope link src 10.0.0.8

Step  9: Test the connectivity

Try ping to any IP address global like google DNS servers

 ping 8.8.8.8

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• Using Terminal to connect to WPA wireless network