[pkg-wpa-devel] Bug#779007: iw: Implement hook script for ifupdown, please?

[Elliott Mitchell]

reopen 779007
quit

I believe such bugs are supposed to remain around.  This (hopefully)
avoids people filing duplicate bugs.  This also functions as a gathering
point for additional reports to come in, it might well be that it is
rather more common than you expect.  Having typed this I'm not planning
to try this again.


On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 05:31:51AM +0100, Stefan Lippers-Hollmann wrote:
> On 2015-02-22, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
> > It would be helpful if the iw package could implement an ifupdown hook
> > script similar to the one the wireless-tools package has
> > [...]
> 
> Just to be constructive about this topic, your original question:
> 
> iface wlan0 inet dhcp
>         wpa-ssid MyNetWork
>         wpa-psk plaintextsecret
> 
> respectively
> 
> iface wlan0 inet dhcp
>         wpa-ssid homezone
>         wpa-psk 000102030405060708090a0b0c0d0e0f101112131415161718191a1b1c1d1e1f

Well, let us compare this to the original report:
# It would be helpful if the iw package could implement an ifupdown hook
# script similar to the one the wireless-tools package has, but using iw
# instead of iwconfig.  Avoiding conflicting with wireless-tools may be a
# bit interesting, but this will make iw rather handier.

Your response looks totally orthogonal to the original suggestion.  The
idea was providing an ifupdown hook script might make the iw package
handier.  Not a thing was typed about which things iw would be used to
configure, since it wasn't relevant to the suggestion.

I suppose I should ask, your personal wireless router gets the IP address
for its 802.11 interface from DHCPing to one of the connected devices?
You might consider you have a rather unusual setup yourself when making
suggestions for other's setups.


On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 05:11:14AM +0100, Stefan Lippers-Hollmann wrote:
> On 2015-02-23, Elliott Mitchell wrote:
> > Meanwhile the former is near trivially solveable, though some trivial
> > cooperation with wireless-tools is needed.  The exit value of running
> > `iw <interface>` and `iwconfig <interface>` tells you whether the
> > interface has wireless support and if so which mechanism.  That merely
> > leaves the corner case of an interface that supports both.
>
> That is no corner case, several RealTek vendor drivers do exactly that,
> being classic fullmac drivers towards the kernel (based on a 2.6.16-era
> ieee80211-softmac, read a forked ipw2x00, stack), but providing a
> shallow cfg80211 API as well (probably to cooperate better with
> network-manager). Several drivers do this, even ipw2x00 does to a
> (very) limited extent.
>
> No, this is not trivial at all. wext is hardly specified in the first

Okay, it may be more common than I thought, but trivial solutions
immediately come to mind.  The first condition for this to be a problem
is you need an 802.11 device which implements both the wext and
netlink-80211 APIs.  Second, this device's implementation of one or the
other API must be bad enough to be "irritated" by the use of the wrong
API.  With these two conditions present, the problem is readily solved
simply by removing either wireless-tools or iw.

In order to make this a *real* problem, you would need a device with at
least two 802.11 interfaces.  One interface implementing the wext API and
one implementing the netlink-80211 API, then one of these two interfaces
would need to implement the other so badly that trying to use it causes
problems.  Once you've got a setup THIS complicated, THEN you would need
to add a "wireless-tooltype" or "wireless-config" option to ifupdown and
have a setting of "iw" or "iwconfig" to specify which API to use (and
then both the iw and wireless-tools packages would need to cooperate).



To repeat the point and make it overt, I'm not dealing with a roaming
device here.  I'm dealing with a *router* which has an 802.11 interface.
Aside from having had painful experiences experimenting with
"network-manager" in the past, it is also *ridiculously* inappropriate
for this circumstance, likewise for wpa_supplicant.

Admittedly, I do know hostapd has ifupdown hooks implemented, but as of
yet I'm unsure whether it handles everything I need by itself.


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