WPA without NetworkManager (was: Re: X on tty1 in Rawhide/F10)

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, 2008-10-30 at 13:34 +0100, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> On Wednesday, 29 October 2008 at 21:57, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski (dominik at greysector.net) said: 
> > > > Not in the context of init.d/network, which is what I meant. (Well, not
> > > > outside of gross hacks.)
> > > 
> > > Yes, it works in that context. /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-wireless
> > > needs a small patch which I posted in bugzilla and which has been ignored
> > > for years. The patch isn't actually mine, it was posted on one of fedora lists.
> > > I can't find that bugzilla report right now so I'm attaching the patch here
> > > instead.
> > 
> > Possibly because that particular patch wasn't ever in bugzilla (AFAICT.)
> 
> It was, although it contained reindentation cosmetics. I only cleaned it up.
> 
> > It's certainly a better one, but there's still the problem of entirely
> > disparate configuration (manually editing wpa_supplicant.conf, etc.)
> 
> What's wrong with manually editing wpa_supplicant.conf?

Because it's not easily from anything but wpa_supplicant, and it's
completely different than the existing ifup/ifdown config system.
System-config-network would have to grow the ability to parse the
wpa_supplicant config file format.  You can't override the variables
from /etc/sysconfig/network if you want to.  There's no separation of
interfaces to allow for multiple connections with two or more wifi cards
with 'ifup number1' and 'ifup number2' independently.

A much better, more integrated and consistent implementation would have
each ifcfg file essentially be a network block in the supplicant config
file.  When you 'ifup my-wpa', the scripts write out a new supplicant
config file using key/value pairs
in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-my-wpa and execute a supplicant
based on that, then somehow wait for the supplicant to connect by
listening on the specific control socket for a connection, and if no
connection occurs, time out and fail just like DHCP fails.  When you
'ifdown my-wpa', it will terminate the supplicant based on the PID file
written to /var/run/wpa_supplicant-wlan0-my-wpa.pid and clean up the
routing and addresses.

That's what the patch _should_ do.  Just tossing a config file off to
the supplicant is a cop-out half solution.

> The patch doesn't break anything. I don't understand why, in the pursuit
> of all-encompassing NM-based network configuration, some people don't want
> to allow any alternative methods.

Look in bugzilla.  There have been wpa_supplicant bugs filed and many
mailing list posts where I and others have said "If somebody shows up to
add WPA support to initscripts in the right way that's great!"  We're
just not going to spend effort on it.

Dan