Setting up WiFi on Ubuntu 14.04 Server from the Terminal

Dec 27, 2014 · Comments
Computers Linux

I was setting up a server today and I didn’t have a wired ethernet drop available for it but I did have WiFi. So I decided to just setup WiFi for today and get it plugged into the network on Monday. I mean how hard could it be to set up wifi right?

I started with this article on the Ubuntu community help portal:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NetworkConfigurationCommandLine/Automatic#WPA_supplicant

I have to admit this got me most of the way, but for my machine there was a crucial piece of configuration missing. It turns out there are two driver options available for wifi cards, wext and nl80211. It took me far too many ~~minutes~~ hours of googling to discover this. Here was the page that explained it for me:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/97828/driver-d-option-under-wpa-supplicant

After updating the driver, here is what my wpa.sh file looks like:

#!/bin/bash
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: wpa
# Required-Start: $network $syslog $local_fs
# Required-Stop: $network $syslog $local_fs
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 6
# Short-Description: Start/stop script for wpa supplicant
# Description: Custom start/stop script for wpa_supplicant.
### END INIT INFO

SELF=`basename $0`
WPA=wpa_supplicant
PROGRAM=/sbin/${WPA}
CONF=/etc/${WPA}.conf
INTERFACE=wlan0
DRIVER=nl80211
DAEMONMODE="-B"
LOGFILE=/var/log/$WPA.log

function start() {

# TODO: Support multiple interfaces and drivers
OPTIONS="-c $CONF -i $INTERFACE -D $DRIVER $DAEMONMODE"

## You can remove this if you are running 8.10 and up.
# Ubuntu 8.10 and up doesn't need the -w anymore..
# And the logfile option is not valid on 8.04 and lower
local ver=$(lsb_release -sr | sed -e 's/\.//g');
[ $ver -lt 810 ] && OPTIONS="$OPTIONS -w" && LOGFILE=""
##

# Log to a file
[ -n "$LOGFILE" ] && OPTIONS="$OPTIONS -f $LOGFILE"

echo " * Starting wpa supplicant"
eval $PROGRAM $OPTIONS
}

function stop() {
echo " * Stopping wpa supplicant"
pkill $PROGRAM
}

function debug() {
stop
DAEMONMODE="-ddd"
start
}

function restart() {
stop
start
}

function status() {
pgrep -lf $PROGRAM
}

function usage() {
echo "Usage: $SELF <start|stop|status|debug>"
return 2
}

case $1 in
start|stop|debug|status) $1 ;;
*) usage ;;
esac

That’s it. At least it was a Saturday so no one saw…

Josh Austin

Setting up WiFi on Ubuntu 14.04 Server from the Terminal