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

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, 2008-10-30 at 21:18 +0100, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> On Thursday, 30 October 2008 at 15:04, Dan Williams wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-10-30 at 13:34 +0100, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> [...]
> > > 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.
> 
> How often do you see machines with multiple wifi cards? I haven't seen
> any. I could easily set one up by adding a usb stick with wifi or a pcmcia
> card, but I haven't needed it yet.

Internal + USB?  If you want to do wireless -> wireless sharing (say, in
a hotel with $$$ wifi) then this is really your only option at the
moment.

Dan

> > 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.
> 
> Alright, I'll see what I can come up with. I guess I can understand your
> unwillingness to accept a half-assed solution that works only in one scenario.
> After all, I don't like half-assed solutions myself.
> 
> Regards,
> R.
> 
> -- 
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>