Re: Braindump on wpa_supplicant

[Olivier Blin <oblin mandriva com>]

Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> writes:

>> This should be possible with current wpa_supplicant, since you can
>> restrain it on a specific network ID.
>
> Well, I wasn't planning on launching a new wpa_supplicant _every_ time I want to 
> connect to a network.  That's a bit bogus.

I didn't mean that!
wpa_supplicant can be controlled by a socket interface, and a control
command can ask it to use a specific network ID.

> What I'd like to do is to launch a 
> wpa_supplicant either when NM starts up, or if it can't be helped, each time an 
> interface is plugged in or noticed.  I'd like to run as few instances of 
> wpa_supplicant as few times as possible.

That's how I'd proceed too.

> Even if wpa_supplicant can be restricted to a specific network, I do not want to 
> write out a config file to tell it so.  I need to be able to tell wpa_supplicant 
> what to do over its control socket.  The only command I want is "connect to this 
> ESSID with this passphrase and/or this certificate".

A simple way to do that would to have a control command to add a new
network, returning a network id.
Then the select_network control command would allow you to choose
which network you want to use.

> I do not want wpa_supplicant to attempt to do any "smart" things by
> itself, since that's what NetworkManager is for.

wpa_supplicant is designed to do that too. Well, whatever, that's your
design choice...

> Well, that would be nice, but I don't think that would be easy to get upstream.  
> Upstream (ie, Jouni) seems to want wpa_supplicant to do everything under the 
> sun, and to simply have NetworkManager be a dumb front-end that writes out a 
> config file and points wpa_supplicant at the config file.  If he would accept a 
> dbus patch, great, I'd love to write it.

I'd be interested too, it would be pretty easier to handle both
event notifications and control commands with dbus.
We could add a CONFIG_DBUS variable in wpa_supplication build
configuration file to allow to compile without DBUS.

Regards

-- 
Olivier Blin
Mandriva
Mandrakesoft becomes Mandriva