[pkg-wpa-devel] Bug#816215: more info

[Stefan Lippers-Hollmann]

Hi

On 2016-03-12, Dima Kogan wrote:
> Hi. I'm also affected by this bug. I'm not running any desktop
> environment; just a basic window manager (notion) on top of X. The
> failure is as described in the original bug report.
> 
> It is reasonable to run applications that configure the network as root,
> and many people do that. Prior to the recent changes to X, "sudo
> wpa_gui" worked just fine, so I imagine that this particular bug is

And it still does work for me, using just sudo, but I still strongly
recommend not running wpa_gui, or rather any X11 application, as root.
If this can't be avoided, I'd suggest to use potential desktop 
environment specific X.org helpers instead of sudo, but sudo is still
an option.

> experienced by many users of wpa_gui. Furthermore, "sudo xeyes" works
> just fine as well, so there's something special about the way wpa_gui
> talks to the X server.
> 
> Are members of the netdev group supposed to be able to talk to the wpa
> supplicant? If so, then that package is currently misconfigured.

No, this needs to be enabled explicitly - netdev is just the recommended
group for this. As mentioned in my previous response to Riley Baird, this
configuration setting goes into your wpa-roam.conf, respectively
wpa_supplicant-%s.conf or whatever you call it. Please do read the 
documentation under /usr/share/doc/wpa_supplicant/, especially the parts
about:

	ctrl_interface=DIR=/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev

> If it's not possible to get wpa_gui to work with the latest X server,
> it'd be nice for the suggested workarounds to be reported along with the
> error messages. Or at the very least, a note in /usr/share/doc/wpagui
> would be nice.

It is working on a pretty minimal, current Debian/ unstable as of an hour
ago (installed from scratch on a netbook with ath5k wlan), system with 
just fluxbox, sudo, and wpa_gui installed (total rootfs size ~1.4 GB), as
shown in the attached screenshot from wpa_gui. I really need something
more to go by to debug this on my end, but so far everything I've tried
is working (without any changes).

Tested combinations, all successful:
- starting wpa_gui as user (member of netdev and configured accordingly).
- starting wpa_gui under KDE5 via kdesu
- starting wpa_gui on a pretty minimal fluxbox based system via sudo

Keep in mind that wpa_gui can only access wireless interfaces that are
already managed by wpa_supplicant (e.g. when you can connect to it via
wpa_cli as well).

From what I see in the screenshot of the original reporter, the problem
seems to be more generic in terms of starting a complex X11/ qt program
under another uid, rather than a bug in wpa_gui itself - but as long as
I can't reproduce it myself, I depend on further information.

Regards
	Stefan Lippers-Hollmann
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