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Setting up Voyage – Basic Networking

Posted: February 16th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: linux, networking | 2 Comments »

Connect to a wireless network

wifi

This will probably only work if you have a very similar system to what I have set up. This should work if you have an Atheros card and your wifi is protected by a WEP key. WPA gets more complicated…

wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode sta
ifconfig ath0 up
iwconfig ath0 essid "YOUR NETWORK SSID"
iwpriv ath0 authmode 1
iwconfig ath0 key 1234123412341234
dhclient ath0
The first line creates the ath0 device, the second turns it on, the third tells it which network to connect to, the fourth sets the authmode which is hardly ever anything but 1. The second to last line sets the WEP key and the last line tells the box to ask the network connected to ath0 for an IP address using DHCP. Phew!
You should be able to prove your box can connect to the internet by sending a ping:
ping google.com
to stop pinging type [ctrl]+[c]

Change the Hostname

You have probably noticed the command prompt says:

voyage:~#

This is the computers Hostname and we want to change it – not only could you have more than one Voyage box on your network, but we want something more memorable! Remember your computer can be accessed at http://hostname/ on your local network – we’ll set this up later.

To change the hostname, we need to edit a file. Files can be edited using a number of editors, I tend to use Nano, which is not installed as standard. To install we need to type the following commands:

apt-get update
apt-get install nano 

The first command updates the database for available packages, the second installs the one we want. The box needs to be connected to the internet before this will work!

Make sure you set the file system to read/write (remountrw) before you try editing any files otherwise you wont be able to save your changes.

nano /etc/hostname

Make the changes and then press [ctrl]+[x] to save the file.

Reboot the system for the changes to take effect.

2 Comments on “Setting up Voyage – Basic Networking”

  1. 1 Jonathan Lumb said at 2:08 am on February 17th, 2009:

    What is the wireless for then? Surely the robotyacht won’t be in range of any wireless networks during its journey around corsica? Or are you going to use the wireless so that you can program and manage the Voyage operating system from another computer using ssh or telnet?

  2. 2 admin said at 11:10 am on February 17th, 2009:

    I don’t think that the project at this phase is going to get to Corsica! – Hopefully I can do some small scale testing on a lake where the wireless will come in very useful! I am probably going to integrate a 3G modem into the project which will relay data to our mediatemple server and will do some research into sattelite comms but yeah, the wifi is useful for development – much easier to have it on the desk next to me than it being downstairs plugged into my router with an ethernet cable!