Connecting to Unsecured Networks

This seems to be a bit of a nightmare with Arch. I think the issue is that it is difficult to test. I typically connect to pretty good networks that have passwords and reasonable security. On vacation though, I don’t have a choice of what to connect to. I really don’t know what the advantage of WPA Enterprise is with the stupid login page. There is no way that is more secure.

However, when you get engaged, take beautiful photos on your brother-in-law’s camera, and need to ship them to your waiting mother, you don’t really have a choice. I’ll try to summarize what I did here for the process:

• Connect to Unsecured WiFi
• Mount an SDCard

WiFi

You’ll want to use wpa_supplicant instead of Network Manager. #TODO I really need to understand what Network Manager is doing under the covers that wpa_supplicant seems to accomplish as well. I was able to direct wpa_supplicant to do what I wanted, and nmcli seemed to fall on its face. I don’t know if I can judge all that harshly because it is very difficult to get answers without internet in the first place.

sudo wpa_supplicant -Dwext -iwlp3s0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

The driver mode wext is somewhat legacy, but any port in a storm. Here’s the contents of /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf:

ctrl_interface=/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=wheel
update_config=1
ap_scan=1
country=US
network={
    ssid="OTWC_POIPU-PT_9-103"
    key_mgmt=NONE
}

After running that command, you might see an output like this:

ioctl[SIOCSIWSCAN]: Device or resource busy
wlp3s0: CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-FAILED ret=-1 retry=1
wlp3s0: Trying to associate with 00:0e:8e:3c:07:d7 (SSID='OTWC_POIPU-PT_9-103' freq=2412 MHz)
wlp3s0: Associated with 00:0e:8e:3c:07:d7
wlp3s0: CTRL-EVENT-CONNECTED - Connection to 00:0e:8e:3c:07:d7 completed [id=0 id_str=]

I don’t know if you really need to run this… #TODO

dhcpcd

You might need to remove the run lock file and kill instances of wpa_supplicant if you do this a bunch of times trying.

sudo rm /run/wpa_supplicant/wlp3s0
killall wpa_supplicant

SD Card

You have to install exfat tools to work with the filesystem that is used on SD Cards by default. After installing these tools, everything worked beautifully.

yaourt exfat-utils
[Number 1 from Community]
mkdir -p /home/drone/media
sudo mount.exfat-fuse /dev/mmcblk0p1 /home/drone/media

I use sxiv to look at the thumbnails and move images around. It works pretty well. I’ll update when I find something better.