The Rantings and Ravings of a Madman

I recently had some issues with the WiFi on one of my computers. The WiFi network it normally connects to was down and it wouldn’t connect to another network. This also happened on my Raspberry Pi recently, so I did something similar to get it to connect.
Using wpa_cli, I got the network to connect to make sure that all the configuration parameters were correct. I then created the configuration file that I needed for automatic connection.

To connect manually, you need to first start up wpa_cli. This assumes that wpa_supplicant is already running, which it should be in most cases. If it’s not, you will see an error when you start wpa_cli.

Otherwise, once you’re in wpa_cli, it will show a prompt similar to this

Selected interface 'wlan0'

>


Using the scan and scan_results command, you can scan for the networks and see some basic information

> scan
OK
<2>CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-RESULTS
> scan_results
bssid / frequency / signal level / flags / ssid
00:55:ab:25:ac:5a 2462 -71 [WPA2-PSK-CCMP][ESS] WLAN-Network
00:11:99:51:ba:f0 2437 -64 [WPA2-PSK-CCMP][ESS] WLAN-Network2
>


In the above scan results, you can see the 2 networks that the computer can pick up, the frequencies / channel that they are broadcasting on, the signal strength, the security type, and network name. Both of these networks are using WPA2 with a Pre-Shared Key.

To connect to one of them, we need to first create a network.

> add_network

This will output a number, which is the network ID.

> add_network
0


This will create an empty network ready for us to configure it.
Next up, we need to set the SSID and PSK for the network.

set_network 0 ssid "WLAN-Network"
set_network 0 psk "SupahSecretPassphrase"


Once these parameters are entered, wpa_cli should show the client trying to connect straight away.
When it tries to connect, it should show something like this

> <2>Trying to authenticate with 00:55:ab:25:ac:5a (SSID='WLAN-Network' freq=2437 MHz)
> <2>Trying to associate with 00:55:ab:25:ac:5a (SSID='WLAN-Network' freq=2437 MHz)
> <2>Associated with 00:55:ab:25:ac:5a
> <2>WPA: Key negotiation completed with 00:55:ab:25:ac:5a [PTK=CCMP GTK=CCMP]
> <2>CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED - Connection to 00:55:ab:25:ac:5a completed (reauth) [id=0 id_str=]


Once the wireless has connected, it should automatically get an IP address.
If it doesn’t you can run the dhclient command to force it to get an IP address via DHCP, or edit /etc/network/interfaces to set a static IP address for the wireless network interface.

Hopefully this helps someone out there !