Setting up a wireless network card, an Intel PRO/Wireless 5100 AGN on Linux Debian 8 "Jessie"

This is my exploration of setting up the wireless network card an Intel PRO/Wireless 5100 AGN on Linux Debian 8 "Jessie". I will not go into the details about the issues I faced and how fixed them so for now I will just list the steps. Please let me know if I missed a step or something.


  1. Make sure the card was detected by the OS using
    • lspci or lsusb 
  2. Download the required packages. You will need iwlwifi, rfkill and wpasupplicant 
    • iwlwifi is a non-free package and therefore you will need to edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add non-free your default update site like so
      • deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
    • Install iwlwifi. This will provide you with all the tools required to configure and start the WiFi
      • apt-get install firmware-iwlwifi 
    • Install rfkill. You need this package to enable and disable the WiFi
      • apt-get install rfkill
    • wpasupplicant provides client support for WPA and WPA2 (IEEE 802.11i)
      • apt-get install wpasupplicant
  3. Make sure the WiFi is turned on and enabled using rfkill
    • First check the situation using the following command. This will show you all the wireless devices and their status
      • rfkill list all
    • As you can see for each and every wireless device there are 2 states, Soft blocked and Hard blocked. If the hard block is yes then turn it on by pressing its corresponding button or flipping on the corresponding switch. Run the command again to make sure it was turned on. 
    • Next you will have to enable the WiFi card using rfkill. Where 1 and 4 are the reference numbers to the wireless card I am working on. 
      • rfkill unblock 1 4
      • Run  rfkill list all again to confirm
  4. Use wpasupplicant to connect
    • First generate the configuration file using wpa_sapplicant.  
    • wpa_passphrase WIFI_SSID "this is a password"
    • This is the output of the above command except that it did not contain the proto parameter so I added it manually.
    • network={
        ssid="WIFI_SSID"
        proto=WPA2
        #psk="this is a password"
        psk=fe9db42992958a3fccc7a3f41f7e9c0f9ad9dd6f7e7a68615d92e4e9ba4bdf93
}
    • Save that under /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
    • Run the following to identify your device name. Mine was wlan0
      • ip a
    • Test the configuration using 

      • wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

    • You should get an output similar to this one. CTRL+C to exit

    •   My Wireless Security setup is the following

    • Double check the configuration by the iwlwifi command 
      • iw wlan0 link
      • You should get an output similar to this 
    • Make sure you can get an IP using
      • dhclient wlan0
    1. Configure interfaces 
      • Now that the WiFi can connect we need to set it up to start automatically and for that all we have to do is configure the network interfaces to include the wireless network card.
      • Edit /etc/network/interfaces and add the reference to the Wireless Network Card as shown below. Restart networking after saving the changes.
      • allow-hotplug wlan0

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

    NOTE: I faced a weird issue where the WiFi network card refused to connect to the wireless router with whatever wpa_supplicant and wireless router configuration. In one of my attempts I tried this command below and it solved the problem with above mentioned configuration
      • iw dev wlan0 set 4addr off

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