Re: Braindump on wpa_supplicant

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 1 Aug 2005, Olivier Blin wrote:
> Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> writes:
> 
> > We could rely on wpa_supplicant to do scanning for us (or, perhaps, only 
> > when we ask it to scan) and then read the scan data from wpa_supplicant on a 
> > per-interface basis. 
> 
> It looks like a good plan!
> That's how I proceed in Mandriva tools to get scanning results.
> Then a small generic daemon forward the results from the socket to
> user applications using D-Bus.
> 
> There's a small problem though, wpa_supplicant only allows one control
> program to be attached on the control socket. So if another program
> starts trying to attach on the control socket, the daemon will loose
> notification of events.
> It would be nice to enhance wpa_supplicant so that multiple program
> can attach at the same time. Maybe I'll ask Jouni on the hostap ML.
> 
> > That's a lot of work though.
> 
> Something like 3 lines of Perl code ? :-p

Well, I'm talking about the whole thing, where we get to modify wpa_supplicant 
for slave mode and what not as well.  We don't want to simply let wpa_supplicant 
loose, since _NetworkManager_ is the program that's determining which network to 
connect to, what password/passphrase/key to use, what certificates to use, etc.  
And I'm not going to write out a config file for wpa_supplicant, that's just 
bogus.  This stuff needs to be tightly integrated, not writing config files for 
stuff all over the place.  The only reason we do that for 
named/caching-nameserver is because it wasn't dbus-enabled yet at the time we 
did the VPN stuff (it has since been made dbus-aware).

Dan