Wireless Tips

Here are some helpful commands for dealing with wireless and wired networking with Laptops

always precede these commands with sudo so you can run these commands as an administrator

ifconfig
"configure a wired network interface" It is a useful command for determining which network interface is being used to connect (i.e. whether you're connected to a wireless or wired network)
 * EXAMPLE

iwconfig
"configure a wireless network interface". It is a useful command for determining which interface is being used for wireless networking.
 * EXAMPLE

dhclient
"look for a server that will give your laptop a network address"
 * If you just type dhclient it will try all interfaces (wireless and wired)
 * You can specify which interface you would like by typing dhclient [interface]
 * EXAMPLE: if you run iwconfig and discover that your wireless interface is eth2, then running dhclient eth2 will only try to connect your laptop to a wireless network

ifdown / ifdown
take a network interface down / bring a network interface up
 * EXAMPLE

EXPLAIN: dhclient eth2 essid "freegeek"