wpa_supplicant support for ifup

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 02:02 +0100, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> On Wednesday, 15 March 2006 at 00:02, Michael H. Warfield wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 12:26 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > > Harald Hoyer (harald at redhat.com) said: 
> > > > What do you think about the attached patch to ifup-wireless? Works for me :)
> > 
> > > This should really be done in NM.
> > 
> > 	Some of us would prefer to avoid being plagued by NM.  It
> > (wpa_supplicant) works just fine, independent of NM and I've just got it
> > hooked in the bottom of the ifup scripts as they describe doing on the
> > project site.  So far, I haven't found a problem that NM solves for me
> > and a few that it creates for me.  NM and wpa_supplicant should each be
> > optional and orthogonal to each other.
> 
> +1
> 
> Personally, I find NM quite troublesome and the named dependency puts me
> off immensely. Why the hell do I need to install a domain name server(!)
> on a laptop? I'm sticking with ifup/ifdown for the time being.

For a few reasons:

1) because if at any point you change a network with your laptop, it
takes up to 30 seconds for Mozilla and most other apps to notice.
Ubuntu even patches glibc to stat /etc/resolv.conf fairly often, just so
this doesn't happen!  Which is something upstream glibc refused to do.  

2) You can't do split DNS with glibc.  When using a VPN, split DNS means
directing only requests for stuff on the VPN to the VPN's name servers.
while cnn.com goes to your local nameservers, not the VPN's.  We don't
do that quite yet, but we planned for it, will do it soon, and named
allows for that.  glibc doesn't, and upstream doesn't want to add that
capability.

3) If you don't like named, DON'T USE IT.  What you don't seem to
realize is that NM doesn't require named.  It doesn't launch named.  It
doesn't use named unless named is running, and named's dbus service is
enabled.  NM will happily write /etc/resolv.conf, just like you want, if
you don't run named.  The choice is, actually, up to you.

So running a local nameserver, and pointing everything to 127.0.0.1
works out quite nicely.  I'm not quite sure what your problem is here,
since you don't even have to use named at all.

Dan