wpa_gui restarting dhcpcd?

[Brian Bender]

On Mar 22, 2007, at 6:32 AM, Roy Marples wrote:

> On Wed, 21 Mar 2007 18:49:20 -0700
> Jouni Malinen <j at w1.fi> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Mar 21, 2007 at 04:59:27PM -0230, Craig Harding wrote:
>>> Has there been any talk of adding code to wpa_gui to restart dhcp
>>> when a new connection is made to a sid? A restart of dhcp is needed
>>> everytime I re-associate or associate with a new SID.
>>
>> I have not heard such discussion. Anyway, a GUI application is not a
>> good place for doing something like this. wpa_cli can be used to
>> implement such a trigger and with some (more modern) DHCP clients,
>> there should not be any need for this kind of trigger since they can
>> determine association changes themselves.
>
> I would argue that this more modern DHCP client is defective by design
> as you may require DHCP on ssid Foo and a static IP on ssid Bar.

Nah, it's not the job of a DHCP client to decide when it's not  
supposed to be used. :) That's a higher-level decision (see below)...

> You may of course want to do other things like launch a VPN client for
> a specific ssid also.

To go a step further than Jouni, I don't even think that wpa_cli is  
really the place to do something like that. Establishing a Wi-Fi link  
is like plugging in a network cable, nothing more. If you want to do  
different network interface configuration things when different  
network cables are plugged in / different WLANs are joined, I think  
that properly belongs in a "location manager" -type application  
(doesn't Gnome have one?) that is either switched manually or sits  
and watches interfaces for link up/down events and maybe tries to  
gather information from them (broadcast traffic, SSID in the case of  
WLAN, etc.) to make smart decisions about which profile to use. I  
really like the way the "unix way" works -- specialized apps doing  
specialized jobs, all plumbed together in different ways. Network  
configuration and link establishment are two different specialized  
jobs (at two different levels, even), and smashing them together in  
the same app feels wrong (and likely would be wrong in many situations).

Just MHO,

  - Brian