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

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

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.

> 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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