Connecting to a wireless network

An Ethernet connection is simple to configure, since it is connected through wired cables with no special requirements like authentication. However, wireless LAN may require authentication like a secret key as well as ESSID of the wireless network to connect. ESSID , or Extended Service Set Identification, is the name of the network. Let's see how to connect to a wireless network by writing a shell script.

Getting ready

To connect to a wired network, we need to assign an IP address and subnet mask by using the ifconfig utility. But for a wireless network connection, it will require additional utilities such as iwconfig and iwlist to configure more parameters.

How to do it...

Let's write a script for connecting to a wireless LAN with WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy):

#!/bin/bash
#Filename: wlan_connect.sh
#Description: Connect to Wireless LAN

#Modify the parameters below according to your settings
######### PARAMETERS ###########
IFACE=wlan0
IP_ADDR=192.168.1...