Re: RFC: WPA-related API changes

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2005-12-07 at 01:46 +0100, Tim Niemueller wrote:
> > 2) Move higher-level key types to the applets, rather than keeping logic
> > for them in NetworkManager.  Right now we have the constants for ASCII,
> 
> Am I right if I say that we just define two interfaces, one which is
> nice for the machine which we will use for communication applet <->
> NetworkManager and another which presents the user with the usual terms
> so this will be the applet <-> user interface. So several different
> terms in the user interface (ASCII key or hex key for wep) have a
> unified form in the applet/NM interface (the n byte key + WEP type).
> In the case this is how it is meant I'd vote for this.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here, but a concrete example of what I
mean here is with WEP keys.  Right now NM does all the key conversion on
the fly.  It would be quite a bit simpler to have the applets/user-tools
themselves do that only when the key is actually entered, and send NM
the key in a standard format no matter what type it was.  The original
idea was to have NM automatically try to hash they keys different ways,
but the stupidity of drivers makes that quite impossible from a
user-experience standpoint (ie, possible wait of 15 - 20s for each try
of a key hash is just not going to work).

This means having the user make choices, but actually not any more than
we do now.  We already as the user for the type of WEP key in the GNOME
applet.  That wouldn't change, nor would any of the UI in my proposal,
with the exception of adding WPA types.

In any case, we need more user-defined settings for WPA anyway, since
WPA2+certificates is certainly not auto-detectable.

Dan