Re: Repeated prompts for passphrase keys - feature or a bug?

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2012-06-26 at 12:31 +0200, Sascha Silbe wrote:
> Ajay Garg <ajaygargnsit gmail com> writes:
> 
> > Whenever a wifi AP goes out of range, we see the popup (repeatedly at
> > regular intervals), asking for the passphrase key(s).
> > This is observed on F17 (and F14 as well).
> >
> > I was just wondering: is this a feature, or a bug?
> 
> From the user perspective, it's certainly a bug. Whether we can do
> anything about it depends on how much we know about the failure
> mode. AFAIK there are some cases where "the credentials have changed"
> and "something else has gone wrong" (e.g. interference) are
> indistinguishable.

Basically, it's really hard to distinguish right now because we don't
have enough information from the supplicant about what the problem was.
But in reality we should just not ask unless there's no existing
password; and when something fails, the UI is responsible for notifying
the user that it failed and that the password may be wrong, so they can
go change it in the control panel and try again.

Dan

> I now managed to find the reference I hinted at before. Dan wrote [1]:
> 
> >>  There's some notes about fixing this in the TODO file in git if anyone
> >>  wants to have a go.  We also need more information from wpa_supplicant
> >>  when things fail, like getting notifications of assoc/auth timeouts so
> >>  that we can do the intelligent thing here and *not* pop up the dialog
> >>  when auth times out, but only pop up the dialog when we're sure it's
> >>  actually a failure of the password/PSK.  So basically we need both some
> >>  wpa_supplicant work here and some NM work.  But it's clearly behavior we
> >>  need to fix.
> 
> Information about this in the mentioned TODO file [2] is rather sparse,
> the closest is "Reconnect to WiFi Networks Only If They Succeeded
> Once". That would be nice, but is a different problem than we're facing
> here. However, the above is already a pretty good explanation of what
> needs to be done: Passing down more detailed failure information from
> wpa_supplicant to NetworkManager and deciding whether the credentials
> may have changed (so we'd need to re-prompt the user) in NetworkManager
> based on that information.
> 
> That's a bit too much and too low-level for Sugar folks to handle, but
> maybe someone else is annoyed enough by the constant prompts to give it
> a try?
> 
> Sascha
> 
> [1] message-id:"1313531090 32524 15 camel dcbw foobar com"
>     https://mail.gnome.org/archives/networkmanager-list/2011-August/msg00107.html
> [2] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager/tree/TODO
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