Right way to set up WiFi in Raspberry pi

I’ve recently tried to setup a WiFi connection with the RaspberryPi and encountered some issues: the connection was not starting automatically. I am using following wifi adapter : 

$ dmesg | grep usb 

New USB device found, idVendor=0bda, idProduct=8179 

After researching the issue, I finally have a configuration that works reliably. Here are the steps I’ve followed.

One final bit left to do now: configuring our adapter. Before that though, we should make sure that you have wpasupplicant package installed since you’ll probably want to connect to a WPA secured network:

$ sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant

 WiFi configuration of router is as follows

Setting up the configuration

Edit the /etc/network/interfaces file to look like this:

auto lo

iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet dhcp

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

Then add your WiFi parameters to /etc/wpa.conf.

network={
ssid="YOUR_SSID"
scan_ssid=1
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
proto=WPA
psk="YOUR_PASSWORD"
}

Restart your networking subsystem with:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Connect automatically when booting

To make the connection work when the RaspberryPi boots, I have added a few lines to /etc/rc.local (source) :

echo "Starting WiFi..."
wpa_supplicant -B -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa.conf
sleep .5s
dhclient wlan0
echo "WiFi should be started"

exit 0

Keep the connection alive

To make sure that the connection stays up, I’ve done two things.

First, disable the power management of the WiFi dongle. Create a new /etc/modprobe.d/8188eu.conf file with this content:

options 8188eu rtw_power_mgnt=0 rtw_enusbss=0

Then, make the RaspberryPi ping the router every minute. Open your crontab:

$ crontab -e

and add this line at the end :

*/1 * * * * ping -c 1 192.168.1.1

Replace the IP address by the actual IP address of your router.

It took me some time to get it right, but now the Pi connection seems to work fine.