Making wpa_supplicant work with dhclient on Fedora

[Pavel Roskin]

On Thu, 2008-05-15 at 10:34 -0400, Dan Williams wrote:
> > 
> > There are two problems here.  One is that the "network" service starts
> > before "wpa_supplicant", and dhclient is called when "network" starts.
> > This means that dhclient fails after a long timeout.  When
> > wpa_supplicant starts, it's too late.
> 
> Because the normal 'network' service doesn't support WPA at this time,
> it was pointless to integrate wpa_supplicant into the network service
> startup scripts (ifup-wireless) until WPA was supported.

OK, I understand that the global wpa_supplicant service with a fixed
list of devices is a hack, which is disabled by default for a good
reason.

A better solution would be to run wpa_supplicant for every interface
configured to support WPA.

> I'd like to add the key/value pairs to the ifcfg files for WPA support,
> which NetworkManager needs anyway to use system connections.  That would
> also mean a fairly straightforward effort to make ifup-wireless write
> out a wpa_supplicant config file and launch the supplicant if you don't
> want to use NM for your interface.

Actually, I would prefer that configuration files are not rewritten by
any scripts (as opposed to more intelligent configuration utilities).
Perhaps it should be possible to have per-interface configurations if
required.

> > The second problem is that dhclient brings the interface down to remove
> > associated routes and other settings.  This breaks the connection.
> 
> Yeah, this is pretty lame and should be required; all it needs to do is
> flush the routes and addresses with netlink.  Apparently it takes a
> shortcut and downs the device.  NetworkManager doesn't do this any more
> for this specific reason.

That's very good news!

> > Use "normal" networking, not NetworkManager, which doesn't support WPA:
> 
> Confused... you mean that "normal" networking (ie, the 'network'
> service) doesn't support WPA, or that NM doesn't support WPA?

I mean NetworkManager doesn't support WPA.  At least it didn't last time
I tried.  I understand that the work is underway.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin