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

[Kel Modderman]

Reinhard Tartler wrote:

>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. 
>

What approach was/is that?

>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.
>  
>

Yes, we face the same problem with Kanotix. The current wpasupplicant is 
not interfaces friendly :-)

>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.
>  
>

Yep. easily supplied via wpa_cli. One would need to handle the check for 
$IF_WPA_CONF differently, I'll look into it.

>
>  
>
>>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
>  
>

For roaming, I'd eventually love to see a wpa_cli action script plugin, 
somehow providing a (user-configurable) means of silently bringing 
up/down each location "alias" specified in interfaces.

>Gruesse,
>	Reinhard
> 
>  
>

Cool, glad you liked the idea, I'll continue to work on these ifupdown 
hooks.

If everyone is in agreement, can I commit these to our wpasupplicant-0.5 
branch at some stage? This could provide the backend for a debconf 
driven configuration asistant as well . . . (and end the wpasupplicant 
init script transition).

Thanks, Kel.