Since I got my Mac some of my FreeBSD projects have been languishing on the back burner. Two are important, getting an IPSEC tunnel using IKE between FreeBSD (racoon) and OpenBSD (isakmpd frontended by ipsecctl) and getting WPA going. A couple of months ago I replaced WEP with wpa in my home wifi setup. There’s no arguing that the security is better and on the Mac it’s drop dead simple. I never understood what was going on in FreeBSD I understand it now. WPA appears to be divided into two parts like IKE. One part runs on the client and another in the Wireless AP. FreeBSD includes a program called wpa_supplicant which manages the WPA key exchange for you. To handle this it also has to manage the wireless interface. The automatic setup is actually pretty easy. I found this which helped me out. I wanted to understand what was going on under the hood. It turns out the setting up the config per the original article is the first step. Then run:
wpa_supplicant -B -Dbsd -iath0
as root. This handles the WPA negotiation. When ifconfig reports that you are connected you can run dhclient ath0 to connect.