Re: wpa_supplicant.conf and various issues

["Darren Albers" <dalbers gmail com>]

On 9/1/06, beerfan <beerfan gmail com> wrote:
> I apologize if all of my questions have been answered somewhere but
> list archive search is currently not functional and google has turned
> up anything useful.

I have tried to put most common question here:
http://live.gnome.org/DarrenAlbers/NetworkManagerFAQ

But obviously it doesn't cover everything and if there is something
you feel should be there please let me know and I will update it.

> I am currently using NetworkManager 0.6.2 on Ubuntu Dapper (i.e., the
> latest distro package) to connect to my home AP using WPA-PSK. My NIC
> is a Netgear WG511U which Ubuntu supported out of the box with madwifi
> drivers. It has been working fine for a while but it takes forever to
> connect after I log in and provide my keychain password (approximately
> a minute).

This is an issue with the Madwifi drivers and associations, my card
has the same issue.  I think it takes ~45 seconds for it to become
active.  The newer Madwifi drivers seem to resolve this and connects
in around 20 seconds, of course the newer drivers support the latest
wireless extension so I do not need to use -Dmadwifi, I can just use
-Dwext and I also use a recent CVS snapshot and not NetworkManager
from the Ubuntu Repo's.

> I am getting really annoyed both with being nagged to provide my
> password and with the huge delay connecting and I hope someone can
> inform me how to improve the situation. It seems like configuring the
> wpa_supplicant.conf file with the appropriate network parameters and
> psk would resolve both issues but from other posts I've read in the
> archives, network manager completely circumvents the wpa_supplicant
> configuration.

This is because Network Manager stores your credentials in the
gnome-keyring, they do this so they are stored securely.  An option to
"publish" these settings system-wide is being planned for version 0.7.
You can install Pam-keyring to resolve this now, this is a PAM module
that will unlock your keyring when you login.  If you look on
UbuntuForums there is a howto to set this up.  Be aware that if you
have other apps that store confidential information in Gnome-keyring
then you are unlocking your keyring for that entire session.

> From my experience the version of the madwifi drivers that come with
Ubuntu are equally slow when I bring up wpa_supplicant by hand and
then ifup.  If you setup the connection in /etc/network/interfaces it
may seem faster because it happens when you boot.

Some background on Madwifi Drivers, NetworkManager, and Ubuntu....
The core Network-Manager development does not work around errors or
issues in the various wireless card drivers, at first this may seem
harsh but the sheer number of wireless cards and all the various
workarounds required for each one is too much to handle so
Network-Manager supports any card that supports the Linux Wireless
Extensions (WEXT) standard.  However numerous people have provided
patches to allow certain cards to work with Network-Manager even if
they don't support WEXT.  The stance the NetworkManager Devs have
taken is that the appropriate place for device specific patches are
with each distribution.

Earlier this year one of the drivers that did not properly support the
latest WEXT was the Madwifi project.  So the Ubuntu Dev's took a patch
posted by Robert Love and integrated it into their NetworkManager
package so Madwifi cards will work out of the box with Ubuntu.  They
also added a few more patches for Madwifi:
1) A patch to translate the Signal strength the the Madwifi cards
report into the more standard set.  (There is a long debate about the
way signal strength is reported that is beyond the scope of this post
but lets put it this way, most cards do it one way and Madwifi does it
another...)
2) An increase to the timeout to allow Atheros cards to associate,
this is to work around the slow association issue with Madwifi cards
that you are seeing now.

Since Dapper was released the Madwifi drivers have come a long way and
now they fully support WEXT and associate much quicker the the only
patch required would be #1 above and not the other two.

> Is there a way to make network manager let wpa_supplicant use its own
> conf file? If not, what is the solution this? I can't believe it
> really takes a minute to negotiate a WPA connection because using a
> manual configured setup takes much less time.

No there is not a way to do this and the way NetworkManager works is
to take all the required configuration options and sends it to wpacli
to bring up the connection so doing that doesn't really fit.  If you
don't need the flexibility that Network Manager provides (ie you only
use one wifi network) you may want to just use wpa_supplicant, ubuntu
provides a handy way to configure this now via /etc/network/interfaces
instead of having to create a wpa_supplicant.conf.  However once you
have NetworkManager working the way you want there will be no need for
that ;-)

Regarding time to associate I haven't seen it take a minute (My
Atheros card took around 40 seconds) but as I mentioned above this is
a known issue with the older Madwifi drivers.  My IPW2200 card
connects quickly and when I installed the newest version of madwifi-ng
and NetworkManager my Atheros card connected quickly as well.

So your options are as follows:
1) To resolve the prompt to unlock the keyring: Install Pam-keyring
(See Ubuntuforums for a howto)
2) To resolve the slow association: Install the latest Madwifi drivers
and the latest version of NetworkManager (There are a couple of posts
on UbuntuForums describing on to do these various items)
3) Petition the Ubuntu Maintainer to backport 0.6.4 to Dapper-updates
(Highly unlikely that he will do this though since there are a lot of
changes and testing would be very difficult)
4) Upgrade to Edgy, though this is probably a bad idea as well since
it may be unstable and you probably don't want to mess with the
bleeding edge unless you have to.