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

[Jason Lunz]

On Fri, Mar 03, 2006 at 01:59:38PM +0100, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> 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.

yes.

> This is a more advanced usage of wpasupplicant. It requires in every
> case manual editing of an wpasupplicant configuration file,

well, sort of. The default wpasupplicant configuration file will
associate with any open AP, so that part's fine. What requires manual
configuration is ifplugd.

Any time I want to add a WEP/WPA-protected AP, I only have to add a
single stanza to wpasupplicant.conf. Everything else is already set up,
assuming the network has DHCP.

> and I can imagine that his doesn't work with all available drivers.

True, but I intend to continue submitting patches to any wireless
drivers I use to make them work this way. I've done so for bcm43xx
already, though that driver has more basic problems with roaming that
make this rather useless atm.

The actual change is very simple; it's only necessary that the driver
reports carrier while associated and vice-versa.

> 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.

I think this is going in the wrong direction. I would say the common use
case for wireless is a roaming laptop, and a static configuration isn't
very well-suited to that.

I think some inter-package coordination is needed in debian so that
a straightforward roaming-wireless-laptop is either the default, or is
easily set up by installing a few packages by flipping a setting
somewhere. We're not very far from that, really, though it took me a
while to figure that out.

There's now a GPL bcm43xx driver in linux for the broadcom chipsets. The
state of the in-kernel intel centrino ipw2xxx is improving. So it seems
likely that in etch, it should be possible for a majority of laptops to
simply work like this out of the box. I don't think it should be an
"advanced configuration".

Jason