How do I enable the wireless network adapter on centos 7 minimal install?

Question

I have just installed centos 7 over an old windows PC. The centos 7 image was of minimal install as I had only 4 GB of pendrive available.

The wifi driver named wlp18s0b1 shows in the list if I do ip link but it's configuration file is not there in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scritps/ so I can't enable this interface using ifup. ifup wlp18s0b1 says the following.

/sbin/ifup: configuration for wlp18s0b1 not found.

Usage: ifup <configuration>

the option nmcli d shows the wifi device wlp18s0b1 listed along with the ethernet card but when I do nmcli conn up it says the following .

Error: unknown connection wlp18s0b1

I am not sure how to bring this device up with nmcli and I don't have any extra network tools such as iw, iwconfig, ifconfig, dhclient available as it was a minimal install.

I only have access to wifi from here so can't use ethernet to install these as well.

Answer 1

The ifup command is the really old way of doing things and requires manual configuration. For wireless on CentOS 7 you almost certainly want to use NetworkManager directly either through GUI (Gnome/KDE settings or nm-applet and nm-connection-editor for lightweight WMs) or using nmcli.

The following example (as root) creates a connection configuration for your WiFi:

nmcli dev wifi connect my-wireless-ssid password my-secret-password

But next time you don't want to create it again but you rather want to work with connection profiles:

nmcli connection show
nmcli connection up my-connection

Once you are up and running on your WiFi network, you can learn more about the tools.