So far my experience with the raspberry pi has been fairly minimal. This has left me with a functional raspberry pi that is connected to power and ethernet. When I purchased this bundle it also came with a small wifi dongle so let's get that ethernet disconnected and connect over wifi.

Task Setup Wifi

Off to the google on how to configure wifi via command line (ssh)

ssh into your raspberry

I know about ifconfig which will list network interfaces

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet

the wireless dongle

Time to scan

sudo iwlist wlan0 scan

results

wlan0     Scan completed :
          Cell 01 - Address: 48:D7:05:F0:D6:0C
                    ESSID:"Apple Xtreme "
                    Protocol:IEEE 802.11bgn
                    Mode:Master
                    Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1)

Next up editing the configuration file as we follow along with the guide.

sudo nano /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

I didn't have any network={} section so had to add it towards the end.

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
network={
        ssid="super_secret_wifi"
        psk="super_secret_password"
}

Now the guide says the unencrypted password, not sure how I feel about that so let's if we have other options...to the google and I found an article about wpa.

If we run wpa_passphrase we will get our encrypted value.

wpa_passphrase super_secret_wifi super_secret_password

network={
    ssid="super_secret_wifi"
    #psk="super_secret_password"
    psk=e1bbe303847b6b70e3550fd0f485c68dd92226e0332dde376ba7c5c79684f903
}

We have the configuration block we can put into the wpa_supplicant.conf file.
I removed the # line so only the encrypted value is present in the file

Recycle the wlan0 interface with sudo ifdown wlan0 and sudo ifup wlan0

If we run ifconfig we now see wlan0 has an ip address!
I also setup dhcp from this article

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:00:00:00:00:00  
          inet addr:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx  Bcast:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx  Mask:255.255.255.0

Disconnected and reboot

I disconnected ethernet and ran the nmap command again to see if we have ssh listening on the wireless ip.

nmap -p 22 --open -sV 192.168.1.*

Yes

Nmap scan report for raspberrypi (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)

mmmmm flashing blue lights

Mental recap

• Configure wifi via command line modifying the file wpa_supplicant.conf
• Creating pass phrase using wpa_passphrase
• Taking interfaces up/down with ifdown ifup