ACC SHELL

Using WPA (WiFi Protected Accees) with SuSE Linux
=================================================

WPA is a system to enhance security for wireless LANs. The Linux
support for it is not very mature yet and not all WLAN drivers support
it already. You can use WPA with Atheros, Intel PRO/Wireless
2100/2200/2915, and Prism2/2.5/3 cards, the latter ones only with the
hostap driver. The hostap driver has made the default driver for Prism
cards in SUSE Linux, so you don't have to do something special to use
WPA for that cards. You will need the package 'wpa_supplicant' (part
of the 'Mobile Computing' package selection). If you did a standard
installation, you will most probably already have wpa_supplicant
installed. Please note that the firmware included in some Prism cards
is quite old and not WPA capable, you may need to update the firmware
of the card (see below).

There is basic support for WPA in YaST. You can configure a WPA-PSK
(aka WPA "Personal") as well as WPA-EAP (aka WPA "Enterprise)
connections. The support for WPA-EAP was initially included in SUSE
Linux 10.0, and may be incomplete, but tries to suffice for most
common setups. If you need a more complex WPA setup you are on your
own. You need to configure wpa_supplicant manually, wpa_supplicant is
the tool which performs WPA negotiation. You need to write a
wpa_supplicant.conf yourself (see wpa_supplicant documentation in
/usr/share/doc/packages/wpa_supplicant/README). The network subsystem
supports user supplied wpa_supplicant configurations, you just need to
set WIRELESS_WPA_CONF in your interface configuration file (see 'man
ifcfg-wireless').


Updating firmware of Prism2 cards
---------------------------------

Variuos firmware packages are available from here:
http://www.red-bean.com/~proski/firmware/
For WPA support a firmware version of at least 1.7.0 is necessary.
There is also an howto on flashing Prism chipsets:
http://linux.junsun.net/intersil-prism/