Connecting a Raspberry Pi to Texas A&M Wifi via Command Line

The recommended flavor of Linux on the Raspberry Pi, Raspbian, uses the LXDE desktop environment, and using its GUI tools to set up wifi is not immediately successful. Command-line setup involves editing two files, /etc/network/interfaces and /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf. Since these are system files, they won't be writable by a normal user. The command sudo -e <filename> can be used to edit system files with superuser privileges, using the default editor. Normally, this is the program nano, which is fairly self-explanatory; make your changes using the keyboard and save the file with Ctrl-X. For advanced users, this can be changed via something like export EDITOR=vi.

The first file, /etc/network/interfaces, needs to have the following:

allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
  wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

The allow-hotplug line allows the wlan0 (wireless LAN) interface to be brought up when hotplugged into a running Raspberry Pi. The iface ... dhcp line means we are requesting an IP address from the wireless network's DHCP servers, and the wpa-conf line specifies which file to use for our auth config.

In /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf, you should have:

network={
     ssid=”tamulink-wpa”
     scan_ssid=1
     key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
     eap=PEAP
     identity=”YOUR_NET_ID”
     password=”YOUR_TAMU_PASSWORD”
     pairwise=CCMP
}

Make sure that there is no space in network={, and that the ssid, identity and passwords are wrapped in quotes.

The network can be brought up or down via sudo ifup wlan0 or sudo ifdown wlan0.

As a final note, be mindful of the fact that doing this leaves your TAMU password on an unencrypted device; anyone with the know-how could take an SD card with these credentials and read them. Don't neglect the physical security of your Raspberry Pi after doing this, since it will contain important information.