[pkg-wpa-devel] Questions - was re: Bug#498923: wpagui needs a menu entry

[Sheridan Hutchinson]

On Monday 15 September 2008 02:16:19 Sheridan Hutchinson wrote:
>> wpagui is a great tool for us wpa_supplicant users, however I've
>> often wondered if it could have an entry in the menu system?

Kel Modderman wrote:
> I agree, and have done some work to make this reality, though it is
> not totally complete yet:

It's great news to hear this is coming along, I think it would help with
the visibility of the tool and increase usage.

> No it is not, wpa_gui should not be run as root if possible. When a
> user is part of the 'netdev' group, and wpa_supplicant is configured
> to grant netdev group members access to the control interface socket,
> you may run wpa_gui as user. This setup is documented for the
> `wpa-roam' use case of wpasupplicant package, see "Interacting with
> wpa_supplicant with wpa_cli and wpa_gui" section of: 
> /usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/README.Debian.gz

I have a couple of thoughts about this.

I have added my users to the netdev group and followed the readme to set
up the correct ctrl_interface line.

1.) Even even after a reboot the wpa_gui command is only available for
the root user.  Do I need to manually extend the permissions on the
wpa_gui binary itself to the relevant users?

2.) Previous I had restricted the wpa_supplicant.conf to just the root
user and root group.  With the netdev functionality and the wpa_gui
tool, could such a normal user retrieve password information for these
networks?  Theoretically?

-- 
Regards,
Sheridan Hutchinson
sheridan at shezza.org

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