depthq - ccm|mac

I managed to get my Dell Inspiron 510m laptop connected to a WPA2 with AES encryption and hidden SSID by doing some minor hacks with configurations files. But I was not totally happy with the setup because it didn't jell nicely with the GNOME NetworkManager.

At first, it just didn't seem to work. I had no idea why. I did some reading online and stumbled upon this short article.

The most important part that would get NetworkManager to work properly is to remove the configurations in /etc/network/interfaces. Just comment out everything except the stuff for the local loopback (lo).

But it wasn't over yet. I still didn't manage to connect to the wireless network at home. It seems although the wireless router is configured to use WPA2 Personal, it might not be so when configuring the settings. One way to find out would be to use the following command:

iwlist eth1 scanning

Replace eth1 with the wireless interface for your laptop and scan for something that looks like this:

IE: WPA Version 1
    Group Cipher : CCMP 
    Pairwise Ciphers (1) : CCMP 
    Authentication Suites (1) : PSK

So just use those settings there and it should all fall in place.

I never realised that connecting to a wireless router can be so challenging.