[Pkg-wpa-devel] [RFC]: ifupdown pre-up, post-down scripts

[Reinhard Tartler]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 12:31:56AM +1000, Kel Modderman wrote:
> Tonight I quickly whipped up the skeleton of some wpasupplicant ifupdown 
> hooks.
> 
> They were tested with the very basic but common interfaces stanza:-
> 
> iface ath0 inet dhcp
>        wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
>        wpa-driver madwifi

Wow! I love this idea! I think this is even better than the pre-up.d/
post-down.d/ approach we tried before. Here is why:

Currently, there are tools like gnome-system-tools (g-s-t) which can
manage a /etc/network/interfaces. They cannot configure wpa, though. If
wpasupplicant would provide interfaces for easy setups like wpa-psk or
peap, then it would be fairly easy to make g-s-t use that. For more
complex setups like authentication via certificates, we still provide a
possibility to the more experienced user to supply a hand-crafted
wpasupplicant.conf.

I suggest to introduce settings like 'wpa-psk-key' and/or
'wpa-peap-username'/'wpa-peap-password'. If all given parameters are
given for such easy setups, the scripts can create a config file for
wpasupplicant on the fly.


> The are basic now, but I am confident they can be extended to cater for 
> advanced/multiple setups (with careful planning).

This is trivial with interface aliasing: Just just an interface on its
own for each location. For a 'roaming' profile, we can consider this as
an advanced usage of wpasupplicant and require the user to provide a
config file

Gruesse,
	Reinhard