[pkg-wpa-devel] Re: wpasupplicant init script

[Reinhard Tartler]

Hi Jason,

I'm quoting you in full so that  the others on pkg-wpa-devel can read
the full context.

On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 08:21:58PM -0500, Jason Lunz wrote:
> The changelog for wpasupplicant says you plan to drop support for the
> init script. This would break the way I currently use wpasupplicant.
> What I do is this:
> 
> 1. Run wpasupplicant all the time, configured to associate with any AP
> (my own APs at a higher priority, of course).
> 2. Run ifplugd, and configure it to 'ifup wlan0' whenever the wireless
> associates.
> 3. when the interface comes up, ifup runs dhclient to get an IP.
> 
> With the wireless drivers I use, successful association with
> wpasupplicant causes ifplugd bring the interface up, and only then does
> the interface come up and run dhclient. This works very well.
> 
> Doing everything from /etc/network/interfaces would be inferior, because
> dhclient would be started at the same time as wpasupplicant, but
> wpasupplicant might not associate. And what calls ifup in the first
> place? Is there some other daemon I can run in the background to see
> whether I can currently associate with an AP? I thought that's what
> wpasupplicant was for.
> 
> thanks for your work on this package,

If I understand you correctly, you are using wpasupplicant to do
'roaming'. This means that the configuration for your locations is
completely in /etc/wpa_supplicant, and you just need to get in range of
an AP and start dhclient afterwards and you are done.

This is a more advanced usage of wpasupplicant. It requires in every
case manual editing of an wpasupplicant configuration file, and I can
imagine that his doesn't work with all available drivers. I don't say
that we want to drop support for this use case, but I don't think that
this is the most common or default use case.

We we currently plan is that it should be possible to configure the most
common setups (wpa-pks, peap, etc) in /etc/network/interfaces. As you
pointed out, this wont work for your setup. For your setup, you indeed
need some kind of init script to run wpa_supplicant all the time.

How does the rest of this mailing list think about this? Shall we
reintroduce the symlinks, and require the user to manually enable a
'roaming mode' (works similar to the old behavior) in
/etc/default/wpasupplicant? 

Gruesse,
	Reinhard