Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Manual wifi setup in Opensolaris

By default nwam (network auto-magic daemon) will take care of setting up your opensolaris machine's network connection. Nwam is great but if you are messing with crossbow and vnics then it can get confused. This happened to me so I turned nwam off and went manual. Luckily we have the dladm tool in opensolaris which makes manual config pretty easy. These are the steps for connecting my laptop to a wireless G network using WPA2 security and DHCP:


root@milwaukee:~# svcadm disable nwam
root@milwaukee:~#
root@milwaukee:~# dladm show-phys
LINK MEDIA STATE SPEED DUPLEX DEVICE
bge0 Ethernet down 0 unknown bge0
iwi0 WiFi down 0 unknown iwi0
root@milwaukee:~#
root@milwaukee:~# dladm create-secobj -c wpa mykey
provide value for 'mykey': ****************
confirm value for 'mykey': ****************
root@milwaukee:~#
root@milwaukee:~# dladm show-secobj
OBJECT CLASS
mykey wpa
root@milwaukee:~#
root@milwaukee:~# dladm connect-wifi -e downstairs -k mykey -s wpa iwi0
root@milwaukee:~#
root@milwaukee:~# dladm show-wifi
LINK STATUS ESSID SEC STRENGTH MODE SPEED
iwi0 connected downstairs wpa good g --
root@milwaukee:~#
root@milwaukee:~# ifconfig iwi0 dhcp start
root@milwaukee:~#
root@milwaukee:~# ping www.disney.com
www.disney.com is alive
root@milwaukee:~#