ifconfig for WLAN using WEP

Scott Bennett bennett at cs.niu.edu
Mon Dec 20 00:14:21 PST 2004


     I've been asked in freebsd-newbies to move this to freebsd-questions,
so I'll start with my original message content after this line.
     I'm trying to get my FreeBSD 5.2.1 system to connect to our household
wireless net.  The router and the only other computer in the household are
using WEP, so my FreeBSD machine needs to do so as well.  Unfortunately,
whenever I add a WEP-related argument (e.g., wep, wepkey, wepmode) to the
ifconfig command, as in

	ifconfig fwe0 wep

I get

	ifconfig: SIOCS80211: Invalid argument

I'm currently running the GENERIC kernel, so perhaps I'm missing some
config option.
     Although I've installed many other UNIX systems, this is my first attempt
to get a FreeBSD system working, and thus I consider myself a newbie and am
posting this problem to this list.  If someone thinks I should have posted
it to freebsd-questions, please let me know.  I'm signed up there, too, so
I can repost this over there if that would be more appropriate.
     If anyone can give me a clue how to get this thing working, I'd really
appreciate it.  The version of XFree86 that came on the CDROM for 5.2.1 is
old and lacks the driver for the Mobility Radeon 9800 graphics card, so I
am using the system with no graphics (and thus no windowing other than the
old 4.3BSD window(1) command), which is a major drag.  I need the net access
to ftp the latest-and-greatest version of X11 or XFree86 to make the machine
really usable.


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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