Wpa_supplicant mystery

[Timothy Murphy]

I was looking through /var/log/ on my laptop,
and saw that there were a number of wpa_supplicant.log* files.
I found this slightly puzzling, as I am not using WPA.
I ran "chkconfig --list | grep wpa" and found that
wpa_supplicant was indeed off.

But when I ran "ps aux | grep wpa" I saw that
wpa_supplicant was nevertheless running.
So I ran "sudo service wpa_supplicant stop".
This had the immediate effect of breaking my WiFi connection,
which only started again when I ran "sudo service NetworkManager restart".

If in fact wpa_supplicant is a necessary part of NetworkManager
even if one is not using WPA,
would it not make more sense to change its name?

Everything to do with WiFi in Fedora seems bizarre and confusing ...