CentOS - Sep 2010 - how to get ASUS USB-N13 802.11n net adapter working on 5.5?

first, the short form of the question -- has anyone got that
wireless adapter working on centos 5.5 and associated with an access
point that uses WPA/WPA2 security?

  and the details.

  in a classroom where there is *no* wired networking at all, all PCs
have only that wireless net adapter, which works fine on windows but,
after installing centos 5.5, unsurprisingly, we have no networking.
there is no backup wired network, and no other adapters.

  there is a CD that came with the adapters, with a Linux directory,
so it was easy enough to dump that onto my personal centos 5.5 box,
and run "make" which generated the loadable "rt3070sta.ko"
module.
and, yes, that module loads.  so far, so good.

  however, that still doesn't do it as based on what i've read
online), because the access point here uses WPA/WPA2, i need to
use wpa_supplicant to be able to configure the wireless interface for
that.  and that's about when i got kicked out of the classroom as they
were closing for the evening.

  thoughts?  any advice humongously appreciated.

rday

-- 

=======================================================================Robert P.
J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

        Top-notch, inexpensive online Linux/OSS/kernel courses
                        http://crashcourse.ca

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========================================================================

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 5:13 AM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at
crashcourse.ca> wrote:
> ?however, that still doesn't do it as based on what i've read
> online), because the access point here uses WPA/WPA2, i need to
> use wpa_supplicant to be able to configure the wireless interface for
> that. ?and that's about when i got kicked out of the classroom as they
> were closing for the evening.
>
> ?thoughts? ?any advice humongously appreciated.
These CentOS wili pages will help:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops/NetworkManager

and

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops/WpaSupplicant

Akemi

On Tue, 28 Sep 2010, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>  there is a CD that came with the adapters, with a Linux directory,
> so it was easy enough to dump that onto my personal centos 5.5 box,
> and run "make" which generated the loadable
"rt3070sta.ko" module.
> and, yes, that module loads.  so far, so good.
If the module builds and loads cleanly when done manually, you 
are half way home  ;)
>  however, that still doesn't do it as based on what i've read
> online), because the access point here uses WPA/WPA2, i need to
> use wpa_supplicant to be able to configure the wireless interface for
> that.  and that's about when i got kicked out of the classroom as they
> were closing for the evening.
heh -- wpa_supplicant is 'lightly' documented, and the process 
for getting a wholly text mode wireless connection, and 
auto-selecting between open and secure with WPA or WPA2 AP's 
seems like a dark art.  The following is from memory as the 
unit in question is not physically on, and not remotely 
reachable at the moment

[As a bit of background, I was tempted by the price of an 
'e-machine' box, while travelling and a laptop died while on 
the road -- the darn thing takes non-CentOS 'wl' Broadcom 
wireless drivers, and the 'atl1c' wired network driver, of 
which I solved one manually, and the other one with a package 
from El Repo
     	/me waves to that fine effort ]

It turns out not to be a 'dark art' to get wireless networking 
on the darn thing after all, but it was not trivial, either. I 
reading man pages, tailing logs, stracing stuff, and so forth. 
Most of the effort ended up in getting the configuration 
correct in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf AND having 
to add a custom add on initscript, and did edits in 
/etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant to get the whole shebang working 
properly and hands off

Quick answer is that a script to this effect ran at step S98, 
and basically:
        	stopped networking
        	stopped a running wpa_supplicant
        	rpmmod'd an instance of my locally compiled wireless
        		driver module
        	re-loaded said custom wireless driver module
        	# [ at this point the driver REALLY loaded ]
        	[re]started the wpa_supplicant
        	[re]started the networking

and dhcp, and the wireless supplicant basically did a:
        	iwlist eth0 scan

... which then walked the enumeration of ESSID's and looked 
for a match in /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf  Once 
found, wpa_supplicant hands along the required credential, 
and 'magic happens'

I assume there are various GUI goop tools to this effect, but 
I am not much of a GUI person ;)

I'll try to remember to write this up more formally.  Hope 
this helps

--
end
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Copyright (C) 2010 R P Herrold
              herrold at owlriver.com
           My words are not deathless prose,
              but they are mine.