Why is it that wireless is the “killer-app” of hardware on the *NIX platforms?  I remember spending hours and hours getting it working via ndiswrapper on Ubuntu back in the day.  Luckily its simple to get working in FreeBSD 7.0, and adding WPA encryption is just a few more steps.

Here I’ll outline what I’ve added to get WPA-PSK working on FreeBSD 7.0 on my Dell Latitude D630.

First, if you are not using the default GENERIC kernel you’ll need to load some encryption modules.

You’ll want to load the following by adding the lines to your /boot/loader.conf:

wlan_ccmp_load=”YES”

wlan_tkip_load=”YES”

wlan_wep_load=”YES”

wlan_xauth_load=”YES”

wlan_acl_load=”YES”

If you are using the default GENERIC kernel these are already included so you can skip right on to the next step.

You’ll need to configure wpa_supplicant with your ssid, key type and pre-shared key.  This is an example of what my config looks like using WPA-PSK from my netgear wireless router:

network={

ssid=”ssid-name”

key_mgmt=WPA-PSK

psk=”pre-shared-key”

}

I also added this line to my /etc/rc.conf to automate the connection process:

ifconfig_wpi0=”WPA DHCP”

Hope it works for you as well.  Good luck!