Re: Preconfiguring WEP keys for network manager

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Sun, 2010-04-11 at 04:56 +0100, Richard Neill wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> I've just joined this list, so I hope I'm asking this question in the 
> right place. What I'm trying to do is to deploy a large number of new 
> company laptops, all with the ESSID/WEP key preconfigured. We're using
> Ubuntu's Ubiquity with automatic install from a USB stick. So I need to 
> write some shell script whose effect will be that Network Mananger 
> already knows the WEP key for the default network, with no further user 
> interaction.

See my reply to your other message about system connections.

> If I put the key into /etc/network/interfaces, then on boot, the machine 
> does come up with the network connected, but as soon as it goes out of 
> range, the connection is lost, and NM is unable to reconnect.

Yes, this might happen, mainly so that NM doesn't keep reconnecting over
and over and over to an AP that you're not able to connect to.

This is a bit tricky to solve, because not every AP shows up in every
scan.  So if we clear the inhibit flag every time the AP drops out of
the scan list, we may end up trying to connect again to an AP for which
you hit the "Cancel" button when NM asked you for the passphrase.

That doesn't help you; but it's clearly something we need to fix.  I
think we do that by differentiating between a "failure" of the
connection and cancellation of the password request.  For some devices
(bluetooth, 3G) where we can't scan for something to connect to, we
treat failure as "don't try again automatically".  For wifi though, we
only set the inhibit when the user hits cancel since at that point, they
clearly don't want to connect again until they choose it from the menu.

If you're interested in helping out with a patch for this, I dont' think
it would be that hard to do, and I'll happily guide you through various
bits.

Thanks,
Dan

> The wep key simply isn't "precious" data, and I'd like to get NM to use 
> a configuration file which doesn't need unlocking, and which never 
> prompts the user. These machines will need to be remotely accessible, so 
> if the relevant Wifi is in range, the latop must automatically connect 
> to it, without waiting on the user to click OK, or authorise anything.
> 
> Is there anything I can do here?
> 
> Thanks for your help,
> 
> Richard
> 
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